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Selma Blair made a surprising admission about her complicated history with alcohol in an interview recorded before the actress’ recent airport controversy.
Speaking on “The Jenny McCarthy Wahlberg Show,” the “Cruel Intentions” star explained that alcohol had once become a way to manage headaches, anxiety and nerve pain long before she realized that multiple sclerosis was behind many of her symptoms.
Blair also made it clear that drinking is no longer an option for her, describing alcohol as something she knows doesn’t work as “medicine” for her body or emotional health.
The timing gives added weight to the comments following the Blair flight incident on October 11, although there is no evidence that alcohol played a role in what happened on board the flight.
Selma Blair says alcohol once helped ease her physical pain
During the interview, Blair reflected on turning to alcohol when she was very young and dealing with physical symptoms she didn’t understand at the time.
“It’s wild the times I, even as a very young girl, went to alcohol,” she explained during the conversation, according to the spokesperson. Los Angeles Times.
Blair said she was not involved in drugs and had difficulty tolerating opioid medication. However, alcohol felt different because it temporarily stopped what was happening in her body.
She recalled using it for headaches and to calm herself down before discovering that it was “the only thing that took away my nerve pain.”
The actress has previously said that she believes the symptoms of MS may have been present for years before she was finally diagnosed in 2018.
The actress explained how the drinking quickly became a dangerous cycle
The temporary relief came with serious consequences. Blair told McCarthy that one drink did not necessarily satisfy the desire for relief. She described the progression from drinking enough to feel calmer to depression as she ate more.
according to AND! NewsBlair realized that the pattern was never going to get her somewhere healthy.
She also explained that her relationship with drinking was not about marrying socially.
Blair said that friends sometimes assumed that she was unstable to mean that she had been drinking, when she would save alcohol for later, once she was home.
The actress described using it to help herself sleep, only to wake up hours later feeling worse emotionally.
That separation is a continuation of what Blair has previously shared about her past. In her 2022 memoir, “Mean Baby,” she wrote extensively about using alcohol for comfort from childhood and struggling with addiction for years.
In the Helen interview, Blair linked her childhood drinking to unexplained pain, anxiety and excruciating fatigue that she later suspected was related to neurological symptoms.
Selma Blair says she knows drinking is something she can’t do
Blair’s comments were just as direct about where alcohol fits into her life right now.
She told McCarthy that she does not identify with what she called the “sober lifestyle,” explaining that she does not frame her life around Alcoholics Anonymous.
However, his limit around drinking felt strong. “Alcohol is not good medicine for me,” Blair admitted.
She even joked about wishing she was someone who could just enjoy two glasses of wine, flirt and have fun. Instead, experience taught her that her relationship with alcohol didn’t work that way.
The actress also discussed the complex process of treating MS, explaining that medications that help one patient can produce very different results for another.
Blair said she tried several treatments that worked well for other people but made her condition worse before she reached a relapse-free state.
She also spoke about being diagnosed with pseudobulbar affect, a brain condition that can cause involuntary emotional expressions such as laughing or crying.
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The interview was recorded before Blair’s recent flight event
The timing of Blair’s interview became especially important after she was arrested following a Delta flight on Oct. 11 from Los Angeles to New York.
McCarthy specifically warned the audience that the conversation was pre-arranged, saying she was sending her “love, sympathy and support” to Blair.
Authorities accused Blair of fighting while on the plane and assaulting a Port Authority officer and a nurse after landing.
She pleaded not guilty to two counts of second-degree assault stemming from the alleged incidents involving the officer and the nurse.
As The Blast previously reported, Blair’s representatives pushed back against some early accounts of what happened.
Her team said she experienced a “medical emergency,” said she didn’t intend to hurt anyone and disputed claims she tried to open an airplane door.
Her lawyers also argued in court that Blair had suffered multiple doses of medication used to control severe neurological symptoms and suffered a head injury, which they said contributed to his confusion.
There is nothing in the available reports to confirm that Blair had consumed alcohol before or during the October 2026 flight incident.
Selma Blair’s earlier plane incident makes her admission particularly interesting
But the subject has a painful history for Blair as another plane incident ten years earlier involved alcohol.
In 2016, she was removed from a flight from Cancún to Los Angeles after exhibiting frightening behavior while traveling with her young son.
Blair later took responsibility, saying she had mixed alcohol with medication and blacked out.
As previously reported by The Blast, the actress apologized to the passengers and crew after this episode.
Years later, Blair said the humiliation was to be a major turning point in her relationship with alcohol.
While promoting “Mean Baby” in 2022, she explained that the possibility that she could have died on that flight, especially while traveling as a mother, helped convince her that she needed to stop drinking.
That history makes her comments to McCarthy unusually poignant in retrospect.
Before the latest flight episode became international news, Blair had already sat down and explained in her own words why she once sought comfort from alcohol, how quickly that comfort could be destructive, and why she eventually learned that it could not be a solution to her pain.
