Sometimes the sweetest thing is taking a moment to rest.
And for Selma Blair, as she navigates life in the spotlight amid her ongoing health challenges, including a diagnosis of multiple sclerosis (MS), it also serves as an important reminder to take some time for herself.
“I’m feeling really well,” she told E! News at ELLE magazine's 2024 Women in Hollywood event Nov. 19. “I do have to remember to rest sometimes, but it’s hard when you get excited about things. But I’m doing really well.” (For more from the ELLE event, tune into E! News tonight, Nov. 20 at 11 p.m.)
The 52-year-old—whose MS has been in remission since 2021—also reflected on the joy that being out and about at events brings her.
“I love to be included with all these wonderful people, you know even that I come out now—there was a long spell none of us were really getting out, or weren’t feeling well,” she added. “So to be out again, it is a celebration. And I love seeing people happy and celebrated. The air feels different, people seem to be really excited right now. I’m just drinking it all in.”
And when it comes to her downtime away from carpets and events, Selma enjoys spending time with her son Arthur, 13, whom she shares with ex Jason Bleick.
“I’m headed out of town, but I’ll be back right in time for Thanksgiving with my son,” she noted of the upcoming holiday. “And I’ll just celebrate it with his dad. Simple, quiet.”
Because when it comes to balancing fame and her personal life, Selma has hit her stride—so much so that she even has a new mystery man in her life.
"I wanted a Midwest man," she told Us Weekly in an interview published in July, "and I found a real Midwest man."
Though she’s kept his name a secret, Selma did add some details as to how they first connected.
"I saw him from across a table and now he's my boyfriend," she explained, noting that she has opted to keep his identity to herself because "relationships are best kept out of press if possible."
Yet finding someone was no walk in the park, as she noted, “Fitting anything in as a mother wanting to build a career and figure out when you're going to get your blood treatments in, a boyfriend falls by the wayside really easily. That's why I would never want to get married. It's a major setup to fail."
But, she added, “But yes, it's possible to find love at 52. And beyond!"
And when she’s not prioritizing her health, her son or her love life, Selma has also made an effort to advocate for and raise awareness about multiple sclerosis—including showing support to fellow Hollywood stars who’ve been diagnosed, such as Jamie-Lynn Sigler and Christina Applegate.
"They're being really open about their experiences," she said told E! News of Jamie-Lynn and Christina in June. "I love that they're doing that. They're both good friends of mine. I love listening to them hang out and discover."
For more on Selma’s health journey, as detailed in her memoir Introducing, Selma Blair, keep reading.
--Reporting by Daryn Carp
Selma Blair keeps cell phone video diaries and one from June 2018, two months before her diagnosis, showed that she was struggling to write and text. She thought the muscle spasms she'd been having—including one in her left leg that affected her stride when she walked in Christian Siriano's Fall/Winter 2018 show at New York Fashion Week that March—might have something to do with horseback riding, her favorite pastime.
In fact, she reveals, she'd felt off since the birth of her son, Arthur, in 2011.
Doctors told her "it's just sadness, you're a mom, you're overwhelmed," she recalls of the attempts she made to find out what was wrong, her symptoms dismissed as manifestations of postpartum depression.
Blair was emotionally fragile, though, after Arthur was born, and she recalls how her own mother, Molly (whom she greatly resembles), had told her that she wasn't marriage or mom material.
It turns out the actress' bittersweet relationship with her at times shockingly critical mother—who died last year during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, preventing Blair from being able to travel to Detroit to be with her family—has shadowed her entire existence. Despite having every reason to want to distance herself (Molly's main reaction to her daughter's big break in Cruel Intentions was to ask why she had to use so much tongue in her kiss with Sarah Michelle Gellar), Blair loves her all the same. She muses that her mom—who sounds as if she suffered from depression—may not have encouraged her in order to toughen her up. As in, life isn't going to be your friend, so you better figure it out on your own.
She wonders if she understands where her mom was coming from "because my brain is hijacked sometimes, too."
Getting a diagnosis was an improvement over not knowing, she recalls, because then at least she could move forward. But then she was left with the reality of her worsening physical ailments, and it soon became apparent to her that her medications weren't helping. According to her assistant Bonny Burke, one of the confidantes we hear from in the film, it was actress Jennifer Grey who brought up stem cell transplants, telling Blair that her friend's brother had been cured of an autoimmune disorder after undergoing the procedure at Northwestern.
After considering her options, Blair decides to go for it, ignoring the insistence from an unnamed friend that she wouldn't survive the process.
Blair is seen having good days and bad, sometimes barely needing the cane as she scales a rocky slope on her Studio City, Calif., property, while at other times her mobility is visibly limited. She basks in the normalcy of being able to cut strawberries on her own in June 2019, "all very new, because I could not do this a couple months ago."
As we see her tender interactions with Arthur, who is obviously the most important part of her life, Blair reflects on blacking out while on a flight with her son (luckily he was sleeping with headphones on, she notes) and his father, her ex Jason Bleick, in 2016—an embarrassing incident that she immediately publicly apologized for, and which prompted her to never take another drink.
"It is the worst thing I've ever done as a parent and thank god nobody was hurt," she says. "Thank goodness I had the sense to be such a self-destructive fool while his father was there."
She also remembers being in pain on that trip, leading to her mixing a pill and booze, one of several instances that leave her wondering whether MS had been encroaching on her life for years before her diagnosis.
Before she goes to Chicago for the stem cell transplant—a multi-step process that only begins with preliminary chemotherapy—she lets Arthur buzz her hair off so he'd be less shocked by seeing her without it upon her return.
After the initial chemo, her treatment includes a rigorous personal evaluation in which doctors purposely mess with her head to test her resilience, giving herself injections to get ready for her cells to be harvested and then five days of intense chemo and isolation at the hospital. On the last day, Blair wanly celebrates that tomorrow will be "my new body's birthday."
She undergoes the transplant, which is followed by the engraftment period, while they wait for the cells to latch on. "My mouth tastes like dirty pennies," she observes in one scene, then gamely takes a lint-roller to her bald head in another. Nine days after the transplant, she's playing with the baby hands and trying out her best Fosse moves, cane in hand. And then after 19 days of isolation, she's discharged.
Then comes the overwhelming sense of unfairness (for us, let alone for her!) that what she just went through didn't completely cure her. Not overnight, and not even months later, when Blair admits she's "judging the process," depressed that she's still struggling with balance, her vision and almost everything else that was bothering her before.
An encounter with cancer survivor Robin Roberts at the TIME 100 Health Summit makes her feel better, the Good Morning America anchor sharing that it took two years before she really felt right after undergoing a bone marrow transplant to treat a rare blood disorder.
Setbacks abound, including finding out for the first time from a doctor in Los Angeles that her brain's gray matter—which affects muscle control, memory, speech and emotions—is damaged, something no other doctor had ever brought up, she says, throughout all those tests and scans she'd had.
But when the film catches up with Blair in the spring and summer of 2020, she's unmistakably doing better, enjoying the company of friends during an intimate birthday party in her backyard and swimming with Arthur.
Not, however, that she doesn't still have her days where she's laid low by what she can't do yet, and going out in public remains far more stressful on her body and mind than chilling at home. When she makes her long-awaited return to riding, she's upset that she only has enough energy for 10 seconds of trotting at a time.
"But the fact that you can do it for 10 seconds, like think about that," her instructor reassures her. "Think about how long it's been since you've been able to do something like that for 10 seconds, it's incredible."
Like the ability to gracefully slice a strawberry, every bit of progress is a step in the right direction.
She says at one point that she can't believe she's a disabled person who's out there helping other disabled people, but that being able to help anyone—even if it's just to make them less self-conscious about using a cane—has given her life purpose.
"I'm embarrassed to say, I'm at peace," she says in the film's final sequence as she jumps into her freshly resurfaced swimming pool wearing her mother's "magician dress," an item Molly never let her daughter try on while she was alive, making it even more fraught with meaning after she died. Blair sheds the garment underwater, leaving that piece of her past languishing at the bottom of the pool while she glides off into her future.