Turns out Adam Devine isn't dying from stiff person syndrome any time soon

Los Angeles Times

04-04-2025

Adam Devine is dying. Adam Devine is not dying. Adam Devine has had a devil of a time the last few years with doctors trying to figure out why some of his muscles have been going into almost-paralytic spasms. One even suggested he could expect to die soon.
Turns out it is likely the pandemic's fault.
'The Righteous Gemstones' actor was a guest on the 'In Depth With Graham Bensinger' podcast this week when he invoked the specter of stiff person syndrome. The two had been talking about the childhood cement-truck accident that dramatically disabled the actor when he was 11.
('Broke everything from my waist down besides my right femur and then crushed everything from the knees down and took all my skin off,' Devine previously said of the accident on Dax Shepard's 'Armchair Expert' podcast in 2019.)
His legs are 'still messed up' now, he told Bensinger, pulling up a pant leg to reveal a gnarly scarred calf. 'I still, like, deal with things.' No surprise, given that he had to relearn how to sit, stand, walk, run — even how to go to the bathroom at school. He said he couldn't walk from sixth grade until partway through eighth as he had surgery after surgery.
But in recent years, he said, he's been trying to figure out why his lower body has been tightening up so much that once again his movement is limited. He said it hurts to sit, stand or walk for very long, and he has to stretch and foam-roll multiple times a day.
'For a while [doctors] told me I was dying. Literally within this last year, they told me that. They told me I had this disease called stiff person syndrome,' Devine said.
The 'Pitch Perfect' star explained that the rare condition, which singer Celine Dion has famously been battling in recent years, makes the muscles so tight that a person ultimately can no longer walk or move.
'Then your heart will stop beating, because your heart is a muscle, and it gets too tight to beat, and then you die.'
Devine was told he had the disease in early 2024, a month before his son, Beau, was born. An average life expectancy of six years was part of the diagnosis.
'So I'm like, great, now I'm going to die, he's going to be 6 years old, he's only going to know a crippled father,' he said.
'And then they told me, 'We think you might not have that.''
Wait, what? Mmm-kay.
But six months went by and still he could walk only a few blocks before he would get impossibly tight. He wasn't getting any better. So then doctors thought once again that he did have stiff person syndrome.
So they sent the four-time Emmy nominee to the physician they said had 'coined the phrase' stiff person syndrome, a doctor who was 'the' expert in the field, hoping for a definitive diagnosis.
That guy told Devine nope, still not stiff person syndrome.
'He was like, 'This is from your accident when you were a child. The spasms are a little unexplainable, but it could just be you got so tight that your body doesn't know what to do with it, so you're misfiring a little bit.''
So now, Devine said, he thinks he simply might have worked out too much during the pandemic lockdown.
'I was so bored. ... I have the personality that I have to do things 110%,' he said. Work, play, food, music, everything in his life gets approached almost with obsession. 'During the pandemic I just got into cycling and CrossFit and I had all the time in the world.'
He would ride the bike for 40 or 45 miles a day, he said, then go straight into an intense CrossFit workout. 'I think I just got so tight, and so tightly wound, and my body has all these things that are a little wonky and a little wrong with it, that I just sort of snapped,' he said.
'I'm still dealing with it. It's been three years now.'
Since learning that he's not going to die soon, he has gotten stem-cell treatments, he said — done in Medellín, Colombia — in his knees, hips and back.
'I think they're kind of working,' Devine said. 'I'm the best I've been, now, in three years.'
Still, don't expect him to be taking on any action-hero roles in upcoming comedy-action movies, no matter how much he might want to do it.
'I'm going to be the comedy guy in the action movie, with an action star — and he does all the action stuff,' Devine said. 'But I really wanted to be the guy that does it all, because I like doing stunts. I think it's cool.
'But now I'm trying to walk that line and seeing what I can do and what I can't.'