Lauren Weedman has been making a living with her face for more than thirty years. The actress and comedian, a familiar presence on Hacks, Abbott Elementary, Euphoria, Will & Grace, and Arrested Development, is a master of the subtle eyebrow lifts and quirks of the lip that she is famously known for.

But then, in August 2024, while she was filming Sirens, a Netflix limited series with Julianne Moore and Kevin Bacon in which Weedman plays a family chef named Patrice, the face she had relied on for thirty years stopped working. 

On a break from the show, she came home to California feeling “just off, like I couldn’t get my energy together.” While shooting in New York, she had been sleeping upright because of persistent headaches she suspected had something to do with the atmospheric fog being used on set. Instead of resting, she went to the gym. “I took a drink from my water bottle, and it all spilled in front of me,” she says. “And I was like, ‘Ew, my water bottle’s broken.’”

It wasn’t broken. After her workout, she showered and looked in the mirror. “I thought I had had a stroke or something.” Within minutes of being evaluated at the emergency room, the diagnosis came back: not a stroke, but a condition called Bell’s palsy. She was started on steroids and antivirals. “And then I was like, yeah, I’ll be fine. I’ll just kick this in a week or so. That was not the case.”

What Is Bell’s Palsy?

Bell's palsy is sudden weakness or paralysis of the muscles on one side of the face, caused by inflammation of the seventh cranial nerve, the facial nerve. It typically comes on over hours to a few days.

“Bell’s palsy is one of the most common cranial nerve problems that neurologists see,” says Gary S. Gronseth, MD, FAAN, professor of neurology at the University of Kansas Medical Center, who led the American Academy of Neurology’s 2012 evidence-based guideline update on the condition. “It’s idiopathic, meaning we don’t know the cause, although it is thought that the most common cause is probably a viral infection, a reactivation of the herpes simplex virus. That causes inflammation and swelling of the nerve. The nerve has a long course through the temporal bone, so it gets swollen and pinched there, and people end up with weakness.” Pregnancy, diabetes, and hypertension all increase risk. 

Weedman’s fear of stroke is a typical first reaction. Brian C. Callaghan, MD, MS, FAAN, professor of neurology at the University of Michigan, says ruling out stroke is what brings most Bell’s palsy patients to the emergency room. “That’s the big concern for them, and it’s the same for us as doctors. Sometimes it’s not so straightforward, but often neurologists can tell, because a stroke usually affects just the bottom part of your face, and this condition affects the top and bottom part of your face.”

But that’s not a distinction a layperson should try to figure out on their own. “If you find that you have weakness on one side of the face, that’s an emergency. You should get it evaluated right away,” Dr. Gronseth says.

There is one effective treatment for Bell’s palsy, and it is time-sensitive. “About 85% of people with Bell’s palsy will have a good recovery if they’re not treated,” Dr. Gronseth says. “But that improves to greater than 90% if you take a short course of steroids within about three days of onset.” The antiviral drug, acyclovir (Zovirax), is commonly used and is the one that Weedman was given. However, Dr. Gronseth notes, “The best studies [for this treatment] don’t show a benefit.”

“It’s kind of like getting antibiotics for a viral ear infection. Sometimes we do things that don’t make a lot of sense. The data is clear that steroids work and the antivirals do not,” Dr. Callaghan says. Most people begin recovering within a couple of weeks and continue through about three to six months; whatever weakness remains at the one-year mark is typically permanent.

For Weedman, it was her physical therapist, not her neurologist, who helped her realize that she was one of the ones who would not fully recover. “She was like, ‘Lauren, this is a chronic condition. Do you understand? This is like diabetes. This is not going to go away. Your face is going to get some improvements, but that’s it. This is you. This is your face,’” Weedman recalls. “And that’s the only time that I really wept.”

Like roughly 15% of Bell’s palsy patients, Weedman has been left with synkinesis— unintended muscle movements that happen at the same time she does something else. For example, her eye waters when she chews. Her mouth pulls when she blinks. Dr. Gronseth, who has residual synkinesis from Bell’s palsy himself, explains that the mechanism is misrouted regrowth: “The nerve can sometimes grow back to the wrong place. So, for example, the nerve that used to innervate the muscles around your lips ends up going to the muscles around your eye. And then when you do something to activate your lip, the muscles around your eye move.”

For patients who are bothered by synkinesis, the most practical treatment is targeted botulinum toxin (Botox). Weedman has been doing medical Botox; she has declined a surgical consultation she was offered, at $500, by a Beverly Hills specialist who proposed moving nerves around. “All these procedures come with risks,” Dr. Callaghan says of the broader category of facial nerve surgery for cases like hers. “I’m not aware of any strong data supporting these interventions.”

Making It Work on Set

Weedman had multiple jobs booked when she was diagnosed: Sirens, Hacks, and Abbott Elementary, three of television’s most acclaimed comedies and an embarrassment of riches for any working actor. Her managers advised her not to tell the productions. “I felt the opposite. I wouldn’t be able to relax if I hadn’t told them,” she says. “My idea was, I would like them to see me, and I think they should add it into the script, so I don’t have to spend the whole time worried about people seeing it.”

All three shows willingly accommodated her condition. On Hacks, where she plays Mayor Jo, the producers were reassuring. “They just said, ‘Don’t worry about it, you’re going to be drunk. We can play that off,’” Weedman recalls. “And they didn’t care at all.” Quinta Brunson, the creator of Abbott Elementary, took the same approach. “Quinta was like, we’ll just add it in,” Weedman says.

For Sirens, Weedman had a Zoom meeting with showrunner Molly Smith Metzler and director Quyen Tran. The way they spoke to her, she says, “made me realize it was worse than I thought. They were like, ‘Can I just say, you are so brave?’ And I was like, ‘I am? Like, should I be more worried about this?’” Working through it was not an act of heroism, she says. “I don’t have the kind of money or stability that says, ‘I can just not work for six months.’ I’ve got no safety net. I’m a single mom. I got to keep going.”

There was also a bigger fear. “All the shows that I was on after I was sick were all pre-existing work. Like I was already booked on that show,” she says. “There were only a couple of jobs that came my way where they saw me, and they said, ‘We’ll come back a little bit later.’” Whether the diagnosis is now affecting bookings, she doesn’t know. “I asked my manager, and she was like, they’ll never tell us if it is.”

The hardest day came at a costume fitting for Hacks, the first time she had ventured out for something that wasn’t a medical appointment. “As soon as I walked in, everybody was talking to me with that concern in their voice,” she says. “And then I saw myself in the mirror in different lighting, and I started crying. That was so painful to be that vulnerable in front of everybody. “I fell in love with a lot of the makeup girls that worked really hard to try to cover up something that couldn’t be covered up.”

"This is a Good Face"

People kept telling Weedman about other actors who had worked through Bell’s palsy, and the names were almost always men. “The women all had recovered from it,” she says. “There was nobody who kept working who had permanent nerve damage.” Then, at actress Jean Smart's holiday party, she met Joe Mantegna, the Tony-winning stage and screen actor best known to current audiences as Special Agent David Rossi on Criminal Minds. Mantegna developed Bell's palsy in the late 1980s while starring in David Mamet's Speed-the-Plow on Broadway, and it left him with permanent facial nerve damage that is still visible decades later.

They talked for a long time. At one point, Mantegna cupped her face in his hands. “He didn’t say what everybody else does. He never said to me, ‘What are you talking about? You’re beautiful,’” Weedman says. “He just goes, ‘This is a good face. It’s a good face. And you have to accept that this is your face now. I hate this saying, but it is what it is.”

Mantegna’s wisdom didn’t lead to a sudden flood of acceptance, at least not right away. “I had a moment of thinking, I don’t want that,” she says. “He’s basically saying, accept that you’re not going to be beautiful.” Later, alone, she cried. “I realized, oh, it’s grief. You have to say goodbye to this.”

But for a long time, Weedman was in denial about the psychological weight of what had happened. “It just felt too fluffy to worry about. Like, oh no, my face isn’t symmetrical, when there were so many worse things that could happen,” she says. “And it was embarrassing to me to care about that. I just didn’t want to be that person. And then every time my physical therapist would talk to me in a loving tone, I would start crying. And she was like, ‘You really should maybe see about getting some therapy, because this is a big deal.’”

Boarding a plane while still wearing an eye patch, she made eye contact with a woman who had clearly just come through surgery; her face was puffy and bruised, and she was visibly unwell. “We had a moment of like, ‘What’s up, sister? What’s up?’ Like when you see another vulnerable person,” Weedman says. “I always like to be let into another layer of the world that I don’t know. Anytime I saw anybody struggling to get up over a curb, I was like, ‘Oh, now I understand the vulnerability of this body.’”

Her Face Now

Because she played the role of a drunk person early on to accommodate her condition, Weedman worried that she would always read on camera as someone who was drunk. But watching her own takes, she has noticed something else about where the depth of her acting comes from. “It’s my voice and my eyes. The emotion comes out more through my eyes, and I think that’s always been true,” she says. “I don’t think about my face when I’m acting. I’m thinking about how I’m feeling.”

She has also learned to make use of the synkinesis. “I kind of like it, too, that I have a tell now. I know that I’m being too stressed out. I’m not getting enough sleep,” she says. “Because before, I could hide it.”

Her diagnostic workup in the emergency room in Los Angeles also confirmed long-standing high blood pressure she had been ignoring; she is treating it now. She’s also trying something else she has long resisted: learning how to rest. “I just have to find something that tells me it’s okay to be quiet,” she says. “I’ve got to get ready to be the old lady in the woods who meditates.”

Asked what she would say to someone newly diagnosed, she returns to the part she had to learn the hard way. “There was a mourning period of saying goodbye to seeing pictures of myself. It’s like after a divorce, seeing the old pictures,” she says. “I was like, ‘I’m not going to smile like that anymore.’ That’s a bummer.”

But she’s slowly learning to believe what Joe Mantegna told her: “This is a good face.”