Christina Applegate reveals how she dumped Brad Pitt — for Skid Row rocker Sebastian Bach — at the height of her “Married … With Children” fame, as she details the dark truths behind her sunny Hollywood persona.
The beloved star, now 54, admits in her new memoir, “You with the Sad Eyes,” that she very nearly didn’t take the sitcom role that made her a star, because “I hated Kelly Bundy.”
After the show became a hit, she was asked to be a presenter at the 1989 MTV Video Music Awards and invited Pitt, then 26 and part of her LA posse — which also included Johnny Depp, whom Applegate admits she was “in love with for years.”
But that night, she only had eyes for the “18 and Life” singer.
“I had spent all night staring at Bach, who was then a long-haired hunk fronting the band Skid Row,” Applegate, who was 17 at the time, writes. “I hate to put it like this, but Brad back then was still making his way as an actor, and he wasn’t yet THE Brad Pitt, the man of so many people’s dreams.”
The actress adds: “And it gets worse: Brad was left to sullenly drive my mom … home. Apparently, at a gas station on the way, Brad almost got into a fight with a bunch of gang members, and, not surprisingly, was subsequently very mad at me.”
She regretted the decision as soon as she found out that Bach already had a long-term partner and a 1-year-old child.
Pitt, meanwhile, “didn’t talk” to her “for many years.”
Applegate recalls that “much later … two of [Pitt’s] movie star girlfriends asked me if it was true that I was the girl who left Brad behind at the MTV Video Music Awards. Brad had apparently told both of them separately that he was still mad at me.
“Eventually, we agreed that I’d been a kid, and though he deserved much better, it was time to forgive the child who dumped him for the lead singer of Skid Row.”
She jokes: “Of course, Brad is now THE Brad Pitt, and Sebastian Bach … well, he still has long hair, I guess.”
Things escalated when she was on “Married … ” as the character of Kelly Bundy was known for her skimpy, skintight rocker-chick outfits. Applegate would work out for hours and go without food to fit into Kelly’s Lycra dresses.
“My ability to catch the eye of a then famous rock star and then ditch someone like Brad Pitt at an after-party … still couldn’t convince me I was an attractive person,” she writes.
“For millions of Americans watching ‘Married…with Children” I was an exemplar of female beauty, but to me, I was ‘too plain,’” she says, “I thought my face was mediocre at best. I worked on my body so hard, but I was never satisfied. There were days when I’d go to a spin class and then work out with my trainer and 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 itself as damaging as any addiction.
“My sickness for perfection was always the driving force in my life.”
However, the star doesn’t blame the show.
“Sure, it was always part of the show that I would be an object for me to leer at, but I was the one who wanted to wear those Kelly Bundy dresses to represent something in the zeitgeist,” she writes.
Indeed, Kelly was originally supposed to be a “tough biker chick,” but that all changed after Applegate saw a screening of the now-classic documentary “The Decline of Western Civilization: The Metal Years” — which includes a beauty competition for strippers clad in “Lycra dresses, their hair way up, super big, all crimped and groupie like.”
About her future plans, the winner says: “I’m going to continue on with my modeling and hopefully go on with my actressing.”
And Kelly Bundy was reborn, Applegate writes, “as a full rock slut.”
Yet she also played her as a virgin, even if viewers were totally in on that.
“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,” the actress writes. “I have been told that I just played a whore. Not true.”
In real life, Applegate dated Red Hot Chili Peppers frontman Anthony Kiedis “for a brief second” when she was 17 and starring on “Married With Children.”
They had a date at a farmers market, where her mom joined them for a sandwich, and Kiedis regaled her with the fact that he never wore deodorant. “A horse will know me before they will know you,” he told her.
“Then Anthony dumped me, but right after he did, he said ‘Hey, could you do my laundry?” And like a stupid f–king fan I did it,” Applegate writes.
Applegate’s diaries “list almost endless problems with the men I picked to date,” she says, noting that she picked “a–holes” and f–kups” she thought she could fix.
She had a lengthy relationship with a man, unnamed in the book, who subjected her to years of physical and emotional abuse — controlling what she wore and ate.
Her mother begged her to “get the f–k away from him.” And Ed O’Neill, who played her dad Al on the show, “hated” the boyfriend so much she thought the actor might punch him.
Applegate had an abortion after becoming pregnant by him in April 1991. She finally kicked the boyfriend out of her Laurel Canyon home after a fight in which he threw a cigarette lighter at her and tipped a bottle of tequila down her throat.
Throughout the memoir, Applegate ponders whether the abuse she put her body through caused her battle with Multiple Sclerosis, a diagnosis she received in 2021.
She went on to date a string of men before marrying actor Johnathon Schaech in 2001 — though, Applegate writes, she knew at their wedding that he wasn’t the person she should be with.
After they split in 2005, she went on to date photographer Lee Grivas and had started a new romance Dutch musician Martyn Lenoble, of Porno for Pyros, when she learned Grivas had died of a drugs overdose. She and Lenoble wed in 2013, and they share a daughter Sadie, now 15.
While working on her comedy, “Samantha Who,” Applegate underwent a double mastectomy in 2008 after being diagnosed with breast cancer, fearing she was “cursed.”
While she hates not being able to be there as much as she wants for Sadie amid her MS struggles — which have left her bedridden and wearing a diaper — Applegate writes, “For so much of my life, I’ve felt like the good underlies the bad, but something strange has happened, something I’m not used to. I won’t lie anymore, be the good girl, and say that any of this is a blessing, but there’s some shred of self-understanding that continues to slowly emerge as I fell the story of these past fifty or so years.
“I want to talk to that little girl who always thought she had to be perfect. Maybe that’s what this book is.”
