Jack Osbourne explains why Selma Blair speaking out about her MS diagnosis is so important
Selma Blair’s appearance on the red carpet at the Vanity Fair Oscars party, in which she carried a cane because of her MS symptoms, and her comments afterward, have not gone unnoticed by Jack Osbourne.
The reality TV star, who’s revealed his own 2012 diagnosis with multiple sclerosis, applauded Blair in an interview with Yahoo Entertainment.
“I think it’s very inspirational for people to see that. You know, by all accounts, if you were just to remove a name and look at a bio on Selma Blair, you would be like, ‘This person is living the Hollywood dream,'” Osbourne, 33, says. “She’s an actress, she’s going to these events, she’s, you know, doing all this amazing stuff and living this great life, but it just goes to prove that this disease doesn’t care who you are or what you’ve got or what job you have.”
He adds that Blair, 46, stands to help a lot of people who are seeing her cope with the disease.
“She is the — I hate to even use this term — but Selma represents the majority of people living with MS and who are bravely… kind of suffering with MS, you know, women in their 40s. That’s the… hardest hit demographic, and I think she is going to provide a lot of inspiration and is inspiring many women who are living with this disease right now.”
In June 2018, Osbourne told Yahoo Entertainment that frustration is what drove him to talk about his own health struggle.
“When I was diagnosed with it, I was really contemplating, like, ‘Hey, do I talk about this? Am I open about this?’ And I ended up essentially getting … fired, for lack of a better word, from a job,” he revealed in an earlier interview. “They said that because of my MS, I wasn’t able to do the job. And I got really kind of pissed off about it, because I was of the mindset, like, who are you to tell me what I can and can not do, based on a disease you literally know nothing about. And it kind of inspired me. I was like, well, people don’t really understand what this is. Even I am having a hard time figuring out what this is.”
The star of Ozzy & Jack’s World Detour said that after sharing his diagnosis, people began asking him regularly asking him questions about MS, and he tried to answer them all.
“It’s funny,” Osbourne said. “Sometimes I’ll have moments where I’m just like, ‘Ah, it’s no big deal. Whatever. Just kind of roll with it, I’m doing OK now,’ that kind of thing. … And then other times, I just get like really pissed off about it. Just like, ‘F***!’ But my thing isn’t, like, woe is me. I just go, like, ‘That’s so annoying. This is the most annoying thing.'”
Blair continued to share her experience with multiple sclerosis on Tuesday, with an interview on Good Morning America.
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