‘Beverly Hills, 90210’ Star Says On-Set Injury Left Her Disfigured

Beverly Hills, 90210 star Gabrielle Carteris, 65, shared details of a life-changing injury she sustained on set that left her “disfigured.”

Carteris, who portrayed Andrea Zuckerman on the hit ‘90s series as a main cast member from 1990 to 1995 and later made cameos, spoke with Steve Kmetko on his podcast Still Here Hollywood.

Following her time on 90210, Carteris appeared in several movies and TV shows. However, her career paused following an injury she allegedly sustained while filming in Canada.

“I was the female lead, and they had a guest player who came on one day,” she began.

“He was supposed to be coming inside of my house, invading my house. I was coming down the stairs, and he comes behind me, he lifts me up, and he drags me down these stairs,” she explained the scene.

“He was a really big guy. He was like six-foot-six,” Carteris said. Carteris, on the other hand, is just five-foot-one, standing well over a foot shorter than her costar.

She continued, “But he was very hyped up, and he kept lifting me up over and over and over again.”

Detecting a potential issue, Carteris recalled telling her co-star, “Don’t touch me anymore,” because he kept lifting her up “by her neck.”

While Carteris did not specify the film, her description aligns with the 2006 thriller Past Tense. Entertainment outlets have speculated Carteris was referring to Past Tense, whose producers she sued in 2007.

“Then a day or two later, I started, like, losing the feeling in my face,” she said.

Her condition felt so dire that Carteris was compelled to contact her husband, stockbroker Charles Isaacs, whom she married in 1992.

“I was actually in my dressing room talking to my husband on the phone,” she said. “And 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, it’s so weird.’”

Carteris, confused by what was happening to her, contacted the producers. “I said, ‘I don’t know what’s going on.’ I was getting headaches, really bad headaches, I wasn’t feeling good,” she recalled.

“I was in a lot of pain. And then suddenly I was on set, and my face totally became, I looked like the Joker. 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 serve this show,” Carteris said.

Palsy is a medical term for paralysis. Common diagnoses include cerebral palsy and Bell’s palsy.

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Initially, Carteris said, the producers wanted to take her to the hospital. “I said, ‘You have to fly me home immediately,’” she recalled, insisting that she needed to be with her family.

Carteris said the trip home left her feeling “embarrassed” because people were staring at her. “I was so, like, really deformed. I couldn’t talk,” she said.

The healing process was neither swift nor easy; it took years for Carteris to recover. She was rehabilitated with the help of the UCLA Movement Disorders Clinic in Los Angeles.

“They were working with me to help me get my speech back and to help my body,” she said.

Carteris won her lawsuit. “It helped to change some laws in Canada,” she noted. And, she found another silver lining from her experience.

“The things that stopped me from continuing with my acting brought me into my leadership and so into my service,” she said.

Carteris was elected president of the SAG-AFTRA labor union in 2016, holding the position until September 2021. In 2021, she became the first American to serve as the president of the International Federation of Actors.

“And it was great,” she said, adding, “That was life-changing, too, right?”