Christina Applegate doesn’t know her own strength. She was so enthusiastic about the task of destroying a car in the first days of shooting her new show Dead to Me that she accidentally injured her back, a pain she heroically endured for the remainder of filming. “I was in severe physical pain, which is probably why I could cry really hard a lot,” Applegate says of playing Jen, a widow coming apart at the seams, in a show she categorizes as a “traumedy.” She excels at playing goofy everywomen, and in Dead to Me she plays against that core likability to portray a deeply repressed widow whose secret dark side comes bursting out.
Sitting on a couch in a mansion once lived in by Elvis, Applegate is self-effacing and funny, telling stories about growing up as a hippie kid in L.A.’s Laurel Canyon (“There were a lot of ponchos”). Like many former child actors, she is entirely pragmatic about her reasons for getting into show business: She wanted to make money to help her “working hippie” single mom, actor Nancy Priddy and support the family. And she loved to act. “My mom couldn’t afford a babysitter. She was in this theater company and she’d have to take me with her, and they’d just put me in plays or she’d take me on auditions.”
Applegate got her SAG card for doing a movie in which she played “a 7-year-old drug dealer” whose line was, something to the effect of, “That’s some good shit, man,” setting an early tone for her slightly absurdist acting career. She clocked guest spots on sitcoms like Silver Spoons and Family Ties, and did a season of a show called Heart of the City before landing the role of Kelly Bundy on Married . . . with Children in 1987, which would run for 11 seasons. She was 15 when she got cast and snobby about comedy at first. “I was like, ‘This is just offensive toilet humor.’ And now I’m the biggest toilet-humor person on the planet. It took me a while to get over myself.”
Christina Applegate with her Married . . . with Children co-stars.
The teenage Applegate could not have been more different from Kelly Bundy. “Completely polar opposite,” she says.“I was a hippie at that point. I never wore makeup. I wore long skirts with bells on them.” Applegate helped shape the Kelly Bundy character from a boilerplate rebellious teen into a sweetly naïve hair-metal bubblehead after seeing a late 80s Penelope Spheeris documentary about the Sunset Strip metal scene. “I was just fascinated with what was happening in the culture at that time, with these girls that would be in these [music] videos. I saw this movie called [The] Decline of Western Civilization Part II. I had seen [Part I], the punk one with Lee Ving from [the band] Fear, actually.” She tosses off this cool L.A. detail casually, as if every teen saw the seminal punk documentary that includes Fear’s frontman, who also played Mr. Boddy in Clue and the strip-club owner in Flashdance.
“The second [doc] was The Metal Years. There’s a girl who wins the beauty contest at this hair-metal club Gazzarri’s on the Sunset Strip. She was wearing this Lycra minidress, which I had never really seen except in music videos, and her hair was really big and blonde. They ask, ‘What’s next for you?’ And she says (Applegate affects a high, girlish Marilyn Monroe voice in imitation), ‘I’m going to work on my modeling and my actressing.’ I remember going, ‘That’s Kelly Bundy!’ We hadn’t figured out who Kelly Bundy really was yet — she was tough and more biker chick in the first season. So she was really birthed from this one moment I had in the movie theater at the Cinerama Dome when I was 16.”
The key to her portrayal of Kelly Bundy was to play the teen-bimbo archetype against itself. “I played her as a virgin in my own mind, and that her sluttiness was really just a perception her brother had of her.” The innocent kid playing at being a more mature vixen was real to Applegate; she may have been working for years, but was still a teenage girl. Married was a crash course in comedy and timing. “That’s where I learned what was funny, how to twinkle above reality, as I like to call it — playing that ballet with an audience. You have to be able to feel where they’re going to laugh. It’s a dance between the two of you. When you’re doing it for the camera in front of an audience, they’re part of the scene as well.”
Christina Applegate as Veronica Corningstone in Anchorman.
ANCHORMAN: ©2004 DREAMWORKS, LLC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
She was 18 when she starred in Don’t Tell Mom the Babysitter’s Dead, whose cult appeal has been reinforced with a new wave of “I’m right on top of that, Rose” and “Dishes are done” GIFs. “People quote that to me all the time,” she says. She did a series of indies including Gregg Araki’s Nowhere, before returning to TV at age 27 with an NBC show called Jesse. She was in another comedy cult classic, The Sweetest Thing, and guested on Friends as one of Rachel’s sisters. In 2004, she auditioned for Anchorman, Will Ferrell and Adam McKay’s first feature, a movie nobody expected to be such a big hit. “It was this little comedy that was outlandish and bizarre and came from their incredible brains.” She notes that she was terrible at improv at first: “An improv muscle is a part of the brain that you have to develop.”
She credits her mom with instilling her with an unshakeable sense of self-worth. “When I would go into an audition, she’d be like, ‘You don’t need them. They need you.’ I always try to remember that. I don’t need anybody. I don’t need their approval, and I don’t need them for any particular reason. That was a mantra that she gave me.” When asked about her experiences with sexism, she says her strong sense of self-worth helped her be fearless enough to just talk back to men who creeped on her. “One producer came up really close to me and said, ‘You look really beautiful today.’ And I remember going to him, ‘Eww.’’’ She says “eww” in a perfect, withering California-girl tone. “I was literally like, ‘Eww. Get away from me!’”
She is excited about Dead to Me in part because of its female showrunner, Liz Feldman. Eight of the first season’s ten episodes were directed by women. “We have a lot further to go with women in this industry and giving them power. That’s why I like being on a show right now that is run by women. It’s primarily written by women. It’s produced by women. It’s starring two women.” The other woman, Linda Cardellini, plays a role about which to say almost anything would be a spoiler. What can be said is that Cardellini and Applegate have electric chemistry and the pairing is inspired. They connected instantly: “We went to lunch and I just knew that she was my kind of girl,” Applegate says.“We’re very much alike and yet also very dissimilar. And not to mention the immense amount of talent that comes from that little person. It was wonderful to work with her, we really held each other up.”
Linda Cardellini and Christina Applegate in Dead to Me.
Despite or because of the emotional intensity of the material, Applegate found the experience cathartic. “Jen is not functioning. She’s letting the world think she’s functioning when she’s not, hence her rage and her darkness. Then she gets this person in her life who lets her know that it’s O.K. to feel the things she’s feeling. She feels she has a comrade, that she’s finally understood by someone who’s not asking for something. That’s what we all need, someone who has empathy.” In terms of empathy, she noticed the difference the female writers made in the material. “When male writers write female relationships there’s always a sense of cattiness, and there’s always their perception of female relationships. I know what a real friendship is with a woman and that there is no competition between us. There is only support, and there is only love, and there is only a non-judgmental ear.” To play a role that reflects women’s real complexities? Applegate says in her laid-back L.A. drawl, “I know! We lucked out, man!”
