‘Beverly Hills, 90210’ Star Details Life-Changing Injury

Beverly Hills, 90210 alum Gabrielle Carteris is looking back on the “disfiguring” injury she suffered on-set while shooting a film.

Just a few years after wrapping her iconic run as Andrea Zuckerman on the iconic teen drama, Carteris suffered a traumatic injury at the hands of her co-star while filming in the 2006 television film Past Tense.

“I was the female lead, and they had a guest player who came on one day, he was supposed to be coming in my house, invading my house,” the actress, 65, revealed on Monday’s episode of the Still Here Hollywood podcast with Steve Kmetko. “I was coming down the stairs, and he comes behind me, he lifts me up, and he drags me down these stairs.”

Carteris didn’t name her co-star, but described him as a “really big guy” who was “very hyped up” and kept lifting her “over and over again.”

“At one point, we were rehearsing another scene, and they were setting the lights, and I said, ‘You can’t, don’t touch me anymore.’ Cause he kept lifting me by my neck,” she recalled.

A few days later, Carteris said she started losing feeling in her face. “I was looking at the mirror, I was getting ready for a scene, and I said, ‘Oh, it’s so weird. Part of my face isn’t moving. That’s so weird,’” she remembered. “I was getting headaches, really bad headaches, and I wasn’t feeling good.”

Suddenly, when she was on set, her face started to look “like the Joker,” the Raising Cain actor recalled. “It was so disfiguring. It was a form of palsy, and then my body started to convulse, and they brought a set doctor in who’s there to assist.”

While flying home to Los Angeles to receive treatment, Carteris was starting to realize the extent of her injuries. “I remember being in the airport really deformed,” she said. “I couldn’t talk. I just felt so embarrassed because people were staring at me, not just from knowing me, but because my body was out of control. It was a very humbling time.”

It took “several years” for the actress to recover from her injuries with the help of the UCLA Movement Center team, who helped her get her speech back and to rehab her body. Ultimately, she did file a lawsuit against the film’s producers, which she won, and she emerged from the situation as an advocate for on-set safety rules, especially for women.

She would go on to serve as the president of SAG-AFTRA for five years, until 2021. “From all that, the things that stopped me from continuing with my acting brought me into my leadership and to my service,” she reflected. “This will be my paying it forward. And it was great, that was life changing too, the journey you never expect.”