Christina Applegate says being married with children made her anorexia worse

Christina Applegate’s memoir ‘You With the Sad Eyes’ is released on March 3 and an exclusive excerpt is available now available to read on Vulture in which the Emmy winner writes candidly about her struggles with body image while filming “Married… with Children.” Applegate played the role of Kelly Bundy in all eleven seasons of the classic Fox sitcom. She originally passed on the show after “I read the script and thought it was crap.”

“To me, and to my mother, it read like a bunch of poorly written potty humor,” Applegate explains. “I had turned down ‘Married…’ so the pilot had another kid in the role of Kelly, but it just didn’t work, so they came back to me. The casting director sent me a VHS of the pilot, and my mother and I reluctantly watched it one night. I’m not sure what we thought we were seeing, or why we watched it in the first place, because I was completely against it. Boy, did we want to hate it. We sat there like two little snotty actors. Assholes who spent their whole lives Shakespeare. And then, as the show played, we realized we couldn’t stop laughing.

Applegate already suffered from body dysmorphia and anorexia before she was cast as Kelly Bundy, and the character only exacerbated the damaging effects on her body. Kelly was the promiscuous and rebellious teenage daughter of the Bundy family who embodied “dumb blonde” tropes.

“I dug myself into a hole with that character, though, because I had to be thin,” Applegate writes. “I had a vision of the specific clothes I wanted her to wear, and to wear those clothes – clothes that would reveal whether you would eat something as small as a single grape – I had to lean even deeper into my eating disorder.”

She continues, “If I ate something terribly large like a bagel, for example, I would take it out and maybe have half of it, or half of half. That would be my food intake for a whole day. Sometimes I would punish myself and not want to eat at all. I was a size 0, and the costume people on ‘Married…With Children’ often had to take my clothes. I was blunt, blunt, blunt.”

“I worked so hard on my body, but I was never satisfied,” Applegate adds. “There were days when I would go to a spinning class, then work out with my trainer, then go to a dance class for another two and a half hours, always seeking the unattainable, abusing my body in the service of a quest for perfection that was as damaging as any addiction.”

Playing Kelly, Applegate often wore clothes that showed off her bare midriff. She writes that the clothes became “tighter” and the skirts “shorter” as the show progressed.

“In season five, my God: I could walk into the living room, like I did in episode 13, ‘The Godfather,’ wearing a fringed leather jacket over a cropped red shirt and there would be a five-second pause in the scene as the audience lustfully screamed at me,” she writes. “Looking at all this now makes me cringe. The show was indeed like that.”
broad and obscene, and today it would have no chance of being made. That’s a good thing: it’s hard enough for young women to thrive in a world of appearances.”

But Applegate holds no grudges toward the show’s cast and crew, nor does she blame anyone for the way playing Kelly affected her anorexia.

“Sure, it was always part of the show that I would be an object for men to leer at, but I wanted to wear those Kelly Bundy dresses,” Applegate wrote. “And as hard as it is to believe, I was genuinely innocent of my effect on people. I was just a child. I knew that my self-denial of food and my generally harmful relationship with it were all based on trauma.”

Go to Vulture’s website to read the full excerpt from Applegate’s memoir “You With the Sad Eyes.”