The health condition Erin Moriarty says is behind what happened to her face
If you've seen speculation online about Erin Moriarty's appearance — particularly around the final season of The Boys — here's what she's actually said.
Turns out Moriarty has Graves' disease, an autoimmune condition that affects the thyroid, and she spent years being misdiagnosed while her symptoms were dismissed as stress.
The facial changes people noticed were not cosmetic surgery. They were illness.
What is Graves' disease?
Graves' disease is an autoimmune disorder that causes the thyroid gland to overproduce hormones — a state called hyperthyroidism. It affects roughly 1% of the population and is more common in women. Symptoms include weight fluctuation, fatigue, heart palpitations, hand tremors, anxiety, heat sensitivity, and — crucially — changes to the eyes and face, including swelling and altered appearance.
What Moriarty has said
Moriarty first disclosed her diagnosis publicly in June 2025, confirming she'd been diagnosed with Graves' disease the previous month. In a 2026 essay for Time, she laid out the full timeline.
Her symptoms started in September 2023, aged 29. Fatigue came first — then it became incapacitating. She was sleeping 19 hours a day on weekends. Mood swings intensified. Her hands and feet went numb. She developed heart palpitations and persistent urinary pain. Her short-term memory deteriorated to the point where learning lines became a struggle.
Before the correct diagnosis landed, her doctors floated post-birth-control syndrome, bipolar disorder, anxiety, clinical depression, chronic fatigue, an intestinal parasite, burnout, and IBS.
"Within 24 hours of beginning treatment, I felt the light coming back on," she wrote.
She credited her The Boys co-star Jack Quaid with encouraging her to seek further medical attention at a point when she was losing the ability to walk.
The plastic surgery rumours
In January 2024 — more than a year before her diagnosis — media personality Megyn Kelly ran a segment speculating that Moriarty had undergone extensive cosmetic surgery. The segment prompted a wave of online abuse.
Moriarty denied the claims, called them misogynistic, and temporarily deleted her Instagram.
Her Time essay addressed this directly: she was experiencing the physical effects of a chronic autoimmune disease on a public stage, and having those symptoms picked apart and mocked compounded the damage.
How she's doing now
Moriarty completed her final season of The Boys, which premiered in April 2026 and concluded in May. She was hospitalised in August 2025 following a severe mental health crisis linked to the toll of prolonged hormonal dysregulation.