Christina Applegate Recalls Having an Eating Disorder While Filming ‘Married …With Children’

Christina Applegate tells all in her new memoir, You With the Sad Eyes, detailing abuse she suffered at the hands of a boyfriend and an eating disorder that began with a childhood taunt when she was just 8 years old. The actress, who was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis in 2021 following an earlier breast cancer battle, also goes into detail about her love life as part of young Hollywood in her heyday.

Cast as the flirty, lycra-wearing Kelly Bundy in the 1987 hit comedy Married… With Children when she was just 17, Christina, now 54, struggled with self-image as she starved herself to fit into the character’s skimpy costumes. “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 admits in an excerpt published by Vulture. Though she couldn’t see it, she was many young guys’ dream. “I was never satisfied,” she says, admitting she’d work out for hours a day.

But she was feeling herself at the 1989 MTV Video Music Awards. Her date? A then-unknown Brad Pitt. But Christina only had eyes for rocker Sebastian Bach. “I left with Sebastian Bach, not Brad,” she admits, according to Page Six. “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 her mother home. “Not surprisingly,” she adds, the future Mr. Jennifer Aniston and Angelina Jolie was not pleased. The pair didn’t speak for many years, with Brad, 62, even telling girlfriends he was still angry. “Eventually we agreed that I’d been a kid,” she writes. “And though he deserved much better, it was time to forgive the child who dumped him for the lead singer of Skid Row.”