Gabrielle Carteris is opening up about a traumatic on-set injury she says changed her life.\n<\/p>\n
The Beverly Hills, 90210<\/a>\u00a0alum was just a few years out of her iconic run as Andrea Zuckerman when she signed on to appear in the made-for-TV thriller Past Tense, which was released in 2006. Carteris was filming a scene in which a home invader was meant to pick her character up by the neck and drag her down a flight of stairs, she recalled on Monday’s episode of the Still Here Hollywood<\/a> podcast.\n<\/p>\n Carteris remembered the actor cast as the burglar as a “big guy, like 6 [foot] 6,” who “was very hyped up and he kept lifting me up over and over and over again.” She said she asked the film’s director to rehearse the scene, and advised her costar not to “touch me anymore, because he kept lifting me by my neck.” They completed the scene, but two days later, Carteris began registering troubling physical symptoms.\n<\/p>\n “I was actually in my dressing room talking to my husband on the phone. I was like looking at the mirror, I was getting ready for a scene. I said, ‘Oh, it’s so weird. Part of my face isn’t moving.'” The actress connected that to the fact that she had been “getting headaches, really bad headaches” for which she had been receiving acupuncture treatments. Before she could make anything of these symptoms, they got worse.\n<\/p>\n “I was in a lot of pain, and then suddenly I was on set, and my face totally became \u2014 I mean, I looked like the Joker. It was so disfiguring, and it was a form of palsy. Then my body started to convulse, and they brought a set doctor in,” she told host Steve Kmetko.\n<\/p>\n Carteris took the doctor’s advice to seek immediate medical attention and flew back to the States. “I remember being in the airport. I was so really deformed, like, I couldn’t talk,” she recalled. “I just felt so embarrassed because people were staring at me, not just from knowing me, but then also because my body was out of control. It was a very humbling time.”\n<\/p>\n The actress said it took “several years” of intensive therapy at UCLA to “get my speech back and to help my body.” She ultimately filed a lawsuit<\/a> against the film’s producers.\n<\/p>\n Get your daily dose of entertainment news, celebrity updates, and what to watch with our\u00a0 Gabrielle Carteris on ‘Beverly Hills, 90210’.<\/p>\n Mikel Roberts\/Sygma via Getty<\/p>\n
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