Emma Caulfield Ford Updates Health After MS Reveal

In a People interview, Buffy the Vampire Slayer actress Emma Caulfield Ford, who played the demon Anya on the TV series, updated her health and detailed her MS battle, which she kept quiet for more than a decade.

The report indicates Caulfield Ford’s symptoms have been extremely mild, and she doesn’t take medication. She has acute sensitivity to heat and stress, but severe symptoms such as fatigue, muscle weakness, and lesions have not manifested.

“I’m very, very fortunate,” Caulfield Ford, 50, told People. “But I’m also aware that, with MS, this could all change tomorrow. I’m stable — and I’ve made it a huge priority to do things so I stay that way.”

MS affects an estimated 1 million Americans. Caulfield Ford received her diagnosis on the autoimmune disease in 2010 after finding the left side of her face had gone numb.

Because her symptoms went away after a few weeks, Caulfield Ford decided to keep her diagnosis secret, even from her family. “I was like, ‘Oh my God, what’s going to happen? What am I going to do?'” she said in the interview. “So I told no one, not even my sister. There are just too many reasons people don’t hire you as it is. I didn’t need to give them any other excuse.”

But when Caulfield Ford was working on WandaVision in 2020 on an extremely hot August day, she ran into trouble. “We were all in a sort of hot box,” she recalled. “I started feeling dizzy and faint. I was like, ‘My body can’t take this.’ I was putting myself under too much physical duress, being out in the heat and breathing the bad air.”

After cooling herself with ice packs, she vowed to no longer keep her condition a secret. “I was like, ‘I can’t be afraid anymore. I have to tell the truth. It’s not good for my health,'” she said.

Caulfield Ford publicly disclosed her diagnosis via Vanity Fair in October 2022. Revealing her condition was designed to provide hope to fellow afflicted. “It’s one of the reasons I decided to go public,” she said, “because if someone can recognize themselves or gain some inspiration from my experience, that’s wonderful.”