Christina Applegate’s memoir, “You With the Sad Eyes,” was published on March 3, and an exclusive excerpt can now be read on Vulture. In it, the Emmy winner candidly writes about her body image struggles while filming “Married…with Children.” Applegate starred as Kelly Bundy for all 11 seasons of the classic Fox sitcom. She initially quit the show because she “read the script and thought it was nonsense.”
“To me and my mother, it looked like a bunch of lame toilet humor,” Applegate explains. “I had turned down ‘Marry Me,’ so they cast another kid in the pilot to play Kelly, but it didn’t work out, so they went back to me. The casting director sent me a VHS of the pilot, and my mom and I reluctantly watched it one night. I don’t know what I was going to see or why I wanted to see it in the first place because I was absolutely against it. Oh my god, how much I wanted to hate it. We sat there like two mean actors. And once the show started, we couldn’t stop laughing. she looked at me. I said. “That’s interesting. That’s good.”
Applegate suffered from body dysmorphia and anorexia before being cast as Kelly Bundy, and this character only exacerbated the negative effects on her body. Kelly was the unruly and rebellious teenage daughter of the Bundy family, who used the metaphor of “dumb blonde.”
“But I dug myself into a hole with that character because I had to be thin,” Applegate writes. “I had a specific vision of what I wanted her to wear, and in order to get her to wear something that would reveal her if she ate something as small as a grape, I had to lean deeper into my eating disorder.”
“For example, if I was going to eat something hideously huge, like a bagel, I would scoop it up and eat half or half of it. That would be my food for the day. Sometimes I would punish myself and not eat at all. I was a size 0, and the costumers on Married…with Children often had to dress me. I was bone, bone, bone.”
“I worked hard on my body, but I was never satisfied,” Applegate added. “I would go to spin classes, work out with a trainer, and some days I would go to a dance class for two and a half hours. I was always chasing the unobtainable, pushing my body hard to achieve perfection, and it was as harmful as any other addiction.”
Playing Kelly meant Applegate often wore clothing that exposed her midriff. She wrote that the clothes became “tighter” and the skirts “shorter” as the show progressed.
“In season 5, oh my god, I’ll walk into the living room wearing a leather fringed jacket over a short red shirt like I did in episode 13, ‘The Godfather,’ and there’ll be a five-second break in the scene while the audience screams greedily at me,” she wrote. “Now I’m cringing watching all of this. That show was just amazing.”
It’s so broad and obscene that it’s hard to imagine it being made these days. That’s good. It’s hard enough for young women to succeed in the world of appearances. ”
However, Applegate harbors no resentment toward the show’s cast or crew, nor does she blame anyone for her role in influencing her anorexia.
“It was always part of the show for me to be the subject of men’s scrutiny, but I wanted to wear a Kelly Bundy dress,” Applegate wrote. “And believe it or not, I was completely ignorant of the impact I had on people. I was just a kid. I knew that my self-doubt about food and my generally toxic relationship with food was all trauma-based.”
Visit Vulture’s website to read Applegate’s full memoir, “You With the Sad Eyes.”
