Christina Applegate Says ‘Married With Children’ Worsened Her Anorexia

Christina Applegate‘s memoir “You With the Sad Eyes” publishes March 3 and an exclusive excerpt is now available to read on Vulture in which the Emmy winner writes candidly about her body image struggles while filming “Married… with Children.” Applegate starred as Kelly Bundy on all 11 seasons of the classic Fox sitcom. She originally passed on the show after “I read the script and thought it was trash.”

“To me, and to my mom, it read like a bunch of poorly written potty humor,” Applegate explains. “I’d turned down ‘Married …,’ so the pilot featured 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 mom and I reluctantly watched it one evening. I’m not sure what we thought we’d see, or why we even watched it in the first place as I was dead set against it. Boy, how much we wanted to hate it. We sat there like two little snotty actory assholes who’d spent their lives doing Shakespeare. And then, as the show played, we realized we could not stop laughing. I looked at my mom. She looked at me. ‘Fuck!’ I said. ‘It’s funny. It’s good.’”

Applegate already suffered from body dysmorphia and anorexia prior to being cast as Kelly Bundy, and the character only worsened the damaging effects on her body. Kelly was the Bundy family’s promiscuous and rebellious teenage daughter who played into “dumb blonde” tropes.

“I dug myself into a hole with that character, though, because I had to be skinny,” Applegate writes. “I had a vision of the specific clothes I wanted her to wear, and to wear those clothes — clothes that would show if you ate something as tiny as a single grape — I had to lean even deeper into my eating disorder.”

She continues, “If I was going to eat something as horrendously huge as a bagel, say, I would scoop it out and maybe have half of it, or half of a half. That would be my food intake for an entire day. Sometimes I’d punish myself and wouldn’t eat at all. I was a size 0, and the costume people on ‘Married …With Children’ would often have to take my clothes in. I was bone, bone, bone.”

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

Playing Kelly meant 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.

“By season five, my God: I could walk into the living room, as I did in episode 13, ‘The Godfather,’ in a leather fringed jacket over a short red shirt and there would be a five-second break in the scene while the crowd hollered lustily at me,” she writes. “I look at all this now and cringe. The show was indeed
broad, and lewd, and it wouldn’t have a shot in hell of being made these days. That’s a good thing: It’s hard enough for young women to thrive in a world of appearances.”

But Applegate does not hold any resentment towards the cast and crew of the show, nor does she blame anyone for the ways in which playing Kelly impacted 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 writes. “And as hard as it may be to believe, I was genuinely innocent of my effect on people. I was just a kid. I knew my self‑denial of food and my generally damaging relationship with it were all trauma‑based.”

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