The day Busy Philipps landed a dream role on CBS’s Cupertino, she learned she had a brain tumor. A Prenuvo scan caught the rare, slow-growing grade 2 oligodendroglioma. Surgeons removed it, and within weeks she was on set. A month later, she was back in the hospital; her dermatologist had spotted a staph infection in the incision in her skull. Most people would call that a nightmare. Not Philipps. “I feel very lucky and grateful that everything happened the way it did.”
That’s Philipps: facing difficulty head-on and emerging triumphant. Born Elizabeth, she’s been “Busy” since childhood. She broke out on Freaks and Geeks in 1999; today, at 47, the actor, author, activist, and mom shares everything with her 2.4 million Instagram followers as if they were members of a private group chat. Ask what the past year taught her, and she offers an optimist’s take: “I think you just have to know that, no matter what, it’s all going to work out.”