Kelly Bundy and Me

I first got my SAG card in 1975, on the back of a series of Kmart radio ads I’d done before I turned 5. By the time I turned 7, I was earning real money for my mom and me. I did ads for Cat Chow and canned ham and then I started doing regular guest appearances on TV, including classics like Family Ties and Charles in Charge. I worked regularly for my entire childhood.

As my career on TV blossomed, so did my struggles with body image. I’d been having these kinds of thoughts for years, and though no one moment can lead to a lifetime’s affliction, one incident in particular still weighs heavy on my heart. When I was 8 years old, one of the neighborhood kids poked at my leg and said, “You’re fat.” I can trace my obsession with my appearance to that comment, though so many other factors led me to be predisposed to that terrible Irish illness Ann O’Rexia.

I was the child who had been surrounded by abuse. I lived in the public eye. I grew up in Los Angeles, a city obsessed with appearance. I craved control in a childhood that had none. All these things made that kid’s comment land hard— they were the kindling just waiting for the spark of cruelty. So began a lifelong struggle with body image and weight, a horrible relationship with food, and a warped sense of self so bad that I would spend the rest of my life with rampant dysmorphia. I never saw the skinny girl everyone else did. I only ever saw something else.

When a new show originally called Not the Cosbys (oh, the irony) but retitled Married … With Children was casting, they wanted a tough, rough‑around‑the‑edges kid to play Kelly Bundy, the daughter of a blue‑collar slob and a live‑wire, blowsy woman. (As originally conceived, Kelly was not a dumbass: She was a biker chick). 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. Not The Cosbys and certainly not for me, thank you very much. 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.”

The first episode of Married … With Children aired on April 5, 1987. The show wasn’t a hit out of the gate. Fox was then a brand-new channel, joining ABC, CBS, and NBC, and it was years away from being the juggernaut it would become. I don’t think any of us thought the show itself would still be going a decade later, and the early, snobbish reviews hardly helped.

Most of them focused on what was perceived to be the show’s crudity, broadness of humor, misogyny, and obsession with sex. Loved by critics or not, I was suddenly on a major TV show and being paid accordingly. I started at 20 grand per episode, which for a 15-year-old was a lot of money (it was a lot for anyone, and it still is). I already owned a house funded by early radio ads, but now my bank account swelled with network cash.

A short time after the show began, I happened to go to the Cinerama Dome on Sunset Boulevard to watch a documentary called The Decline of Western Civilization Part II: The Metal Years. In the movie, documentarian Penelope Spheeris heads to Gazzarri’s, a nightclub on the Sunset Strip, to chat with a young woman named Cindy Birmisa, a.k.a. Miss Gazzarri Dancer 1987. Cindy had just won that prestigious competition, a contest in which girls wearing Lycra dresses, their hair way up, super-big, all crimped and groupielike, dance and twerk for their suppers, all hoping to win that cherished title. At one point, Spheeris asks Miss Gazzarri, “What are you going to do now?” and without missing a beat, Birmisa answers, “I’m going to continue on with my modeling and hopefully go on with my actressing.”

The next morning, I called production and the wardrobe people on Married…: “Kelly Bundy is someone else now. We’re going down to Melrose. We’re going to get some concho belts. We’re going to get Lycra dresses. We’re going to go full rock slut.” The transformation was immediate and iconic. Kelly now exuded a kind of innocent sexiness. She was fully recognizable as an ’80s icon, a lovable airhead who hung out with wannabe rock stars.

If you watch Married … With Children closely, you’ll see pretty quickly that I played Kelly as a tease and as a virgin—which is why I think viewers loved her rather than hated her. One of the creators, Michael Moye, and I talked about this regularly. We agreed to keep Kelly virginal and have the “Kelly is a tramp” opinion come solely from her brother, Bud. In season two, Bud says, “You’re dirt, Kel.” When I watch this now, it rings harshly and makes Bud seem despicable to me. But in the episode, I reply, “Yes, but everybody knows it!,” taking the wind out of his misogynist sails. Kelly knew what people thought of her and wasn’t fazed by it because we all knew, or should have known,it wasn’t true. (And yet, alas, in that same episode I’m wearing a tight leather skirt and wiggling my ass to throw the other bowlers off in a bowling tournament.)

That said, Kelly was never overtly promiscuous. Bud might have accused herof it, but she gave no indication that she did much beyond flirting. She was a product of the time, of MTV music videos with women who wore corsets that were way too tight and did weird stuff for guys with frizzy hair. At the time, these videos were everywhere, and it was my way of expressing what was happening in the Zeitgeist.

The world seemed to think that I, Christina Applegate, not Kelly Bundy, dressed like Miss Gazzarri too. This suited me greatly because away from the set I could just be me. In private, I was writing poetry and dressing grungily, slathered in patchouli oil like a little hippie weirdo.

I could walk through Hollywood and only the keenest of observers would recognize me. I dug myself into a hole with that character, though, because I had to be skinny. 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.

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. 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. My diary from 1987 reveals a 16‑year‑old who, though now increasingly famous, was struggling and often in emotional agony:

I hate to look at myself anymore. I’m bored with everything about me. My hair,face, body. I want auburn hair right above my breasts. I want a defined face. I want to be beautiful. But now I’m too plain. I’m not ugly, but I’m not anything exciting. I will blow them away with my portrayal of a nympho on Jump Street, though. So ha, ha, motherfuckers.

I hate to look at myself anymore. I’m bored with everything about me. My hair,face, body. I want auburn hair right above my breasts. I want a defined face. I want to be beautiful. But now I’m too plain. I’m not ugly, but I’m not anything exciting. I will blow them away with my portrayal of a nympho on Jump Street, though. So ha, ha, motherfuckers.

In 1987, I had indeed booked a guest spot on 21 Jump Street, another hit Fox show. It was being filmed in Vancouver rather than L.A., and it would be the series that made Johnny Depp’s name. I already knew Johnny: He was part of my friend group growing up, a group that included my still best friend, film producer Sam Sarkar. Sam has been there for me in every conceivable way since I was 15 years old.

Orbiting in and out of this group was a little‑known actor named Brad Pitt. In 1989, I invited him to be my date at the MTV Video Music Awards. He was already a part of my extended friend group—we had been platonic pals for the longest time. He would often swing by my 750‑square‑foot rowhouse and we’d have barbecues and hang out, always as part of a bigger group. Sometimes he and Sam would do a little gardening—I still have pictures of them with rakes in their hands cleaning up my mom’s yard.

Then one day I took another look at Brad and thought, Hmm … Apparently, he did the same, so I invited him to the awards. I had to get there early to rehearse my appearance, and Brad was kind enough to drive to my house to pick up my mom and Lori Depp and get them to the theater. (Johnny and Lori had been married for two years in the mid‑’80s.)

That night, I was to present the Best Group Video Award alongside AliceCooper. I was peak Kelly Bundy at that point, at least as far as the outside world saw it—even the script I’d been handed played into my dumb-blonde persona. As we introduced the nominees, I was to ask Alice, “No solo artist has ever won in this—coincidence or conspiracy? What do you think?,” to which he was to reply, “Christina, you’re such a Bundy.”

I was something else, too, at least in my own mind. I’d chosen a Ceil Chapman gown to wear for that MTV show. Friends told me it wasn’t appropriate for that kind of evening. It was too classy, too Old Hollywood. Chapman was a legendary designer of the ’40s and ’50s—she dressed Marilyn Monroe, Greer Garson, Elizabeth Taylor, and many others—and to get the dress, we had to punch in a secret code at an atelier and agree not to touch any of the garments housed there unless we intended to buy them. That Chapman dress is one of a kind. I still have it. Diaphanous and ethereal, it boasts large red and yellow and black hand-drawn flowers on a white shift, and I paired it with a scarf of the same material wrapped around my blonde hair. I think it’s the single best dress I’ve worn in my life. I felt incredible in it, and no, it wasn’t the kind of thing the MTV awards expected, and no, I didn’t give a shit. That dress was me, expressed perfectly. In fact, I felt so powerful and sure of myself for once that when the awards show was over, I left with Sebastian Bach, not Brad. I had spent all night staring at Bach, who was then a long‑haired hunk fronting the band Skid Row. Brad was left to sullenly drive my mom and Lori home and, not surprisingly, was subsequently very mad at me. We didn’t talk for many years after that.

My ability to catch the eye of a then- famous rock star and ditch someone like Brad Pitt at an after‑party while wearing a one‑of‑a‑kind Ceil Chapman dress still couldn’t convince me I was an attractive person. For millions of Americans watching Married … With Children, I was an exemplar of female beauty, but to me I was “too plain.”

More and more, my midriff was bare on the show, the clothes tighter, the skirts shorter. 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 th scene while the crowd hollered lustily at me. 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.

Yet I can’t blame anyone on Married … for what I went through. 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. 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. I had seen altogether too much at a young age, and any sense of control and safety was passing at best. Anorexia has been likened to a kind of OCD. When someone makes me feel out of control, I have to reassert that control, and anorexia lets me do that. Like many traumatized people, I ache for control, and food is one place I’m able to achieve it.

In 1999, I shot the movie Just Visiting in the United Kingdom, and someone on the set was so cruel to me. When we wrapped and I’d made it to the airport to go home, I felt like a kidnap victim who had finally been released and was now running toward their family members. When I got back from the U.K., I got a lot of help for my dysmorphia, even though it would linger.

One night, my friends were at my house, and we ordered from Pace, the famous Italian restaurant in the Canyon. It serves a delicious salad called the insalata vegetale. It’s filled with provolone, fresh mozzarella, zucchini, squash, green beans, tomato, garbanzo beans, and olives and is dressed in a redwine vinaigrette.

The cheese and the oil were not going in my body, no way, so I asked for no cheese and no dressing. One of my friends, overhearing my order, said, “No cheese? But that’s the fun part!” Something changed that night. I relented and got it with cheese, and since then, I’ve never gotten it without. My relationship with food is so much better than it ever was, but it took a long time to improve. It was helped by my doing Sweet Charity because to do that Broadway show I had to be an athlete. I had to be strong and had to keep my nutrition.

In 2021, I was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. MS attacks your nervous system and slows down your functions—your respiratory system, your organs, everything. The disease eats away at all the things we take for granted. Some of us with MS have a raft of pain; some don’t. I have a lot of it. When I wake up, I often can’t get my arm to move far enough to grab the cup of water by my bed or my phone from its charger. I have infusions every six months to slow the disease’s progress, but those infusions kill all the B cells in my body, making me prone to infection. The illness has given me serious stomach issues. My stomach frequently slows to a halt, leaving me to regularly rush to the emergency room in agony. Most days, simply walking across the room feels like scaling a mountain.

When the MS hit, the stability I’d fought so hard for went haywire. I had to take 15 hours of steroid infusions, and immediately everything just went. I felt like a blob.

“Oh wow,” I could imagine everyone saying.“Christina Applegate, of all people, is fat.”

Sometimes the weight bothered me more than the disease. I suppose that’s the curse of being a woman. I didn’t look in the mirror for a year. Then I was put on a clear liquid diet because of my stomach issues, and suddenly, everything dropped off me. Within seven months, all of it was gone, and I was down by 50 pounds or more. These days, my legs are tinier than they’ve ever been.

As I write this, there are tamales downstairs that are the best tamales you could ever have—I want to eat five of them right now, I’m so hungry—but I know if I do, I’ll probably end up in the ER again. So once again, the good is followed by the bad: I’ve managed to arrive at a much healthier place when it comes to my relationship with food, only to get out of the shower and see legs that are scary‑looking.

I have no muscles, just sticks. It’s dangerous to be walking around with zero muscles on my body: It means my bones aren’t protected if I fall, and it scares me.

But there’s still that little voice in my head saying, “You’re really skinny. You have the legs you always wanted. Good for you.” This is the sickness. But she’s not going to win.

Adapted from You With the Sad Eyes: A Memoir, by Christina Applegate. Copyright © 2026 by Christina Applegate. Reprinted by permission of Public Affairs, an imprint of Basic Books Group. All rights reserved.

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You with the Sad Eyes: A Memoir by Christina Applegate