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NEED TO KNOW
- Lauren Weedman, who plays private chef Patrice on the Netflix hit Sirens, experienced a flare-up of Bell’s palsy while filming the show
- The actress says she was embarrassed, but “waiting for it to get better just was not an option,”
- She’s since seen improvement in the symptoms of Bell’s palsy, which is a sudden weakness or paralysis of the muscles of the face
While filming the Netflix hit Sirens, actress Lauren Weedman experienced a flare-up of the paralyzing condition Bell’s palsy — which was then written into the show.
“The idea of sitting out and waiting for it to get better just was not an option,” Weedman, 56, who plays Patrice, the long-suffering personal chef to a wealthy New England family on the Julianne Moore-led drama, told The Huffington Post. The actress and mom to son, Leo, 15, said she spoke to Sirens showrunner and creator Molly Smith Metzler, and Quyen Tran, director of the upcoming episodes, about her condition.
Courtesy of Netflix
“I wanted to talk to [the Sirens team] about it as soon as I could so I wouldn’t be stressed the whole time,” says Weedman, whose condition impacted her ability to be fully expressive. As John Hopkins Medicine explains, Bell’s palsy is a sudden paralysis or weakness of the facial muscles, usually on one side of the face.
She’d had a mild case while pregnant with Leo, but Weedman explained this time was more severe.
But showrunner Metzler just folded Weedman’s health crisis into her character. “At that point, I had fallen in love with Lauren like everyone else had,” Metzler told the outlet. “I just felt awful that she was going through something like that. We didn’t even wanna conceive of the show without her in it.”
Weedman says it was so “kind,” telling the outlet, “It was really hard for me to think that I mattered.” As she explained, she was raised to not “make a big thing out of being hurt or sick.”
They wrote it into the role, leading to Patrice’s memorable line: “Every summer, this happens; the stress of this job, my Bell’s palsy is back.”
ABC/Youtube
Although her flare-up has subsided, Weedman’s Bell’s palsy was written into subsequent roles on Hacks and Abbot Elementary, leading her son Leo to quip: “Mom, it’s no big deal. This is your Bell’s palsy era, that’s all.”
As Abbot creator Quinta Brunson told the outlet, “The way I look at it, that is what normalizes any form of otherness … Her dealing with it falls in line with who [Lauren] is. She just rolls with the punches and does her job.”
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