The perfect blonde who was consumed inside
Christina Applegate just dropped a bombshell in her memoir, “You with the Sad Eyes.” And no, they’re not just funny anecdotes from the recording sets. The actress opens her heart about the hardest battle of her life: the anorexia that almost destroyed her during her adolescence in Hollywood.
The most striking thing is how he directly points to one of his greatest hits as a trigger. We all remember Kelly Bundy, the superficial and desired eldest daughter in Married with Children. Well, it turns out that character was a curse for Christina.
“To me and my mother, it seemed like a bunch of poorly written scatological humor,” he confesses about his first impression of the script. He even rejected the role considering it “lewd” and “garbage.”
But fate, or Fox, called again. And when she and her mother watched the pilot, they couldn’t help but laugh. Thus began a career that would make her famous… and deeply unhappy.
When fiction makes reality sick
Applegate was already dealing with body dysmorphia and eating disorders before the show. But the role of Kelly, that “perfect American teenager,” demanded an extreme thinness that made everything worse.
The pressure was brutal. The clothes they made her wear were so tight that, according to her, “you could tell if she ate something as small as a grape.” So he decided not to eat it.
His routine became hell: excessive exercise and tiny portions. It reached size zero.
“If I was going to eat something as huge as a bagel… I would eat half, or half of half. That was my intake for an entire day,” he says with a rawness that hurts.
Costume designers had to constantly adjust her clothes because she was “on the bone.” But on screen, he was still the thin, blonde ideal that America admired.
“I worked hard on my body, but I was never satisfied,” she writes. “Always looking for the unattainable, mistreating my body in a search for perfection as harmful as any addiction.”.
Eleven seasons playing an empty stereotype while his health crumbled inside. It is the dark side of the television success of the 90s that few wanted to see then… and that Christina now has the courage to tell.
