By the end of high school, I sure did.
Oh, and I wasn’t pregnant. In fact, I was a virgin.
I’d come to find out that comedy is one of the hardest types, if notthehardest type, of acting. For it to be effective, you have to perform as though you’re working on the biggest drama in the world, but then you’ve got to twinkle above it, turning up the volume into another realm. It’s crucial to find the right level for that twinkle dial: if you turn the dial too high, then you veer off into camp. Certain movies call for camp, likeAnchorman,but for subtle humor, the dial’s got to be at a two, not a ten. You have to work comedy the same way you would anything else. It takes taste, and skill, and care, and a kind of reserve so you don’t descend into something garish.
I’d turned downMarried…,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. It’s really dirty and good.” Mom just nodded; I think she knew we’d been given a gift.
I came down from my high horse and accepted the part. The producers had me come to a studio in Burbank to do a “chemistry read.” I hate that phrase; it makes me want to throw up when someone uses it, including me. Whoever is the best person for the job is the rightperson for the role—you can hate someone and still do a great job. Debra Winger and Richard Gere famously didn’t like each other when they madeAn Officer and a Gentleman,but they fucked like two rabbits in heat (in the movie, that is). But there, acting opposite me, was David Faustino. David and I hit it off so well in that read, and that was that. They had hoped that David and I were the team. It was almost like they knew it all along.
Now I knew it, too.
FIVE
MARRIED… WITH CHILDREN
Love,
Christina Applegate
(?just practicing!)
BY THE MIDDLE OFSeptember 1986, I was practicing signing my name for fans. Thank god my friend who’d busted me for my attitude as we passed Fox that day wasn’t privy to my diaries.
I had been regularly working for my entire childhood, but as I approached fifteen, perhaps some part of me recognized that a new kind of fame—the kind of fame where autographs would be asked for and granted—was just around the corner. Sure, I’d done a whole bunch of TV shows, but I could still walk the streets of Los Angeles without anyone recognizing me.
All that was about to change.
The first episode ofMarried… with Childrenaired on April 5, 1987. The show wasn’t a hit out of the gate—Fox was then a brand-newchannel, joining ABC, CBS, and NBC (imagine: just four stations!), and it was years away from being the juggernaut it is these days. 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 quickly became paid accordingly. I started at twenty grand per show, which for a fifteen-year-old was a lot of money (it was a lot for anyone, and it still is). I already owned that house behind the Country Store in Laurel Canyon, the one the early radio ads had funded, but now my bank account swelled with network cash.
But money wouldn’t solve everything. By January 1988, the negative aura around the show, and my lingering superiority complex when it came to comedy, was evident in my diary entries. That month I wrote, “I’ll show these fuckers that I ain’t no comedy bullshit actress…,” and “I need to do amovie. I like it so much more than this fucking comedy live-audience bullshit. Comedy is all timing and line readings. I hate that.”
Despite my teenage angst, the set itself was a formative place to work because it was all professional all the time—few allowances were made for my tender age, and I respected that. I remember being sick with a 103-degree fever one day. I was lying on the famous couch and said to a nearby stage manager, “Can you please get me some orange juice?”
She said simply but not unkindly, “You have legs.”
Message received. I never asked anybody for anything ever again, to the point where years later, when I was working eighteen hours a day because I was the central character, and in every scene, of thesitcomSamantha Who?,I was still running off to get my own coffee, until a PA finally stopped me.
“Can you please stop going to craft services?” he said. “You’re actually taking time away from set.” Still, it hurt every bit of myself to ask him to get me my double espresso. (I was so tired I was drinking ten or more every day just to get through.)
SoMarried…was where I truly grew up. It was a place of do it for yourself, a place to be professional, to be on time, to know your lines, and everyone else’s, to hit your marks. There was no fucking about—ever. (Let it also be noted that my mother came to every single taping across all eleven years.) It may have looked like a loosey-goosey comedy, but as I’ve said, comedy doesn’t work unless it’s tight, choreographed, nailed.
We nailed it every single week.
Though Kelly Bundy was supposed to be a tough biker chick, that changed quickly. A short time after the show began, I happened to go to the Cinerama Dome on Sunset Boulevard to watch a documentary calledThe 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, aka 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 groupie-like, dance and twerk for their suppers, all hoping to win that cherished title.
At one point, Spheeris asks Miss Gazzarri, “What are you goingto do now?,” and without missing a beat, Ms. 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 onMarried…
“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.”
