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Christina, That's Who
From sexy teen icon to Broadway star to the title character in Samantha Who?, CHRISTINA APPLEGATE has reinvented her career time and again, to great effect. Now, following public disclosure of her struggle with breast cancer, she declares herself a strong woman and unsinkable star with plenty more tricks up her sleeve.
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With her sunny looks and fantastic figure, Christina Applegate could have buried her comedic talents and carved a career out of playing dumb-blonde love interests. Thank goodness she didn’t. As Kelly Bundy on eleven seasons of Married with Children, she was pitch-perfect and hilarious. We loved her in the absurdly titled film Don’t Tell Mom the Babysitter’s Dead, when she played a teenager who inherits adult-sized responsibilities and finds both empowerment and terror in taking them on. On Broadway she earned a Tony nomination for her role in Sweet Charity. And in her current lead on Samantha Who? she plays an amnesiac woman examining her true, and often embarrassing, identity—prime terrain for an actress who can pull off comedy and humility so fluidly.
After recently going public about her breast cancer and double mastectomy, Applegate is facing the challenges of adulthood with characteristic tenacity. She is 36, divorced, living with her best friend, Rachel, who doubles as her assistant, and assuming the enormous responsibility of going public as a role model while keeping it raw and real. Los Angeles Confidential investigates further:
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LOS ANGELES CONFIDENTIAL: You were nominated for an Emmy for your role on Samantha Who?, and there’s buzz around the possibility of your clinching a SAG or Golden Globe Award. What would winning mean to you?
CHRISTINA APPLEGATE: Well, what it always does is help the show. For me, being not only an actor on the show but part of the producing team, that’s always a plus.
LAC: What was it like to be a professional actor as a child?
CA: I think [this goes] for anyone who started at a young age: You have to put on that hat of being an adult when the rest of you hasn’t caught up with it. You’re sort of forced to grow up. People always say you grow up fast, but I don’t think you do at all. You just do what you have to do to be responsible and professional, but inside you’re still going through all the normal insecurities and learning about yourself.
LAC: You’ve been so brave and open about dealing with breast cancer, and already you’ve helped so many people. But has it been difficult for you? Have you wished you had more privacy with it?
CA: Well, there are two sides to it. One side is that this came into my life for whatever reason, but I can use it as an opportunity to help people. That’s the blessing in it and that’s the best part. It gave me a lot of fire. But it’s hard to talk about it in front of the world. I am a very, very, very private person, and I don’t talk about what hurts me, what pains me. I don’t talk about the tragedies in my life. I find that if you’re in the public eye you have to preserve yourself or you’ll lose all sense of yourself. But if I didn’t say, “Hey, this sucks and this hurts,” I’m not allowing other women to just relax into it. We sometimes feel like we have to be these warriors, and as the patients we end up being the caretakers for the people around us a lot of the time. One of the survivors I met through all this said, “If you can’t admit that this sucks, I can’t even talk to you, because the truth of the matter is: Some of this sucks.” But it’s also something we can get over, take control of, and move on from.
LAC: Have other celebrities given you advice?
CA: Actually, it’s been pretty overwhelming! Overwhelming support, even from people I didn’t know. So many people reached out to me, like Olivia Newton-John and Cynthia Nixon and Melissa Etheridge, reaching out just to say: You know, I get it.
LAC: You must be experiencing such a transformational time. What’s on your mind? What preoccupies you?
CA: A lot of things. A few weeks ago I was on my back, having to be a patient, which I’m not good at. Let me tell you right now: I am the worst patient on the planet. It was really, really hard for me just to let other people take care of me. Now that I don’t have to do that, I’m getting back to work and figuring out how to do it with balance. I used to be a total workaholic and now I’m figuring out how to balance it out.
LAC: Where do you think your workaholism comes from? Does it come from a fear or a strength?
CA: It comes from being [a professional as] a kid and that being all I know. I spent most of my time on a set. That’s how I lived. That’s where I learned about everything you could possibly learn about. No offense to my mom, but I was around my TV family more than I was around my own family. So it’s a huge part of who I am. And on a set, I know where my place is; I know my footing. I know what I’m doing there and I don’t have many skills outside of that. I think a lot of actors have a hard time in between jobs because we don’t really know how to live outside this thing that we do. So what I’m trying to do in between the noise is find things that bring me joy, that don’t necessarily have anything to do with my job. And I’m still trying to figure out what those things are. I took up knitting. I’m learning how to play guitar.
LAC: Do you see motherhood in your future? Is that part of the dream of your life?
CA: Absolutely. Absolutely. I mean, I’m not 100. I still have some time left!
LAC: What kinds of opportunities would you like to see come your way?
CA: Well, I’d love to go back to New York someday. Performing on Broadway was one of the biggest joys of my entire life. And I really do like producing. I love having a hand in the creative process. I find it’s really thrilling. Mostly, I hope people continue to watch Samantha Who?. And I hope they watch it because they love it, and not because they feel sorry for anybody on it.
LAC: What do you love most about LA?
CA: Besides my house? I just bought a beach house. I have a house in the hills where I live, but I love that in less than an hour you can be someplace beautiful.
LAC: Is your beach house in Malibu?
CA: Malibu-ish.
LAC: Do you surf or swim, or do you tend to stay at the house?
CA: I kayak and take long walks. Mostly I just sit out and stare. Today it’s raining, so in a little bit I might put a fire in the fireplace.
LAC: When did you buy it?
CA: I started looking on the day I was diagnosed with cancer, actually. And I’ve always wanted to do this. I don’t know why I kept putting it off, but that jump-started me to saying, Aw, what the hell? And that’s something I want to share with people too, that there has got to be a savoring of this lifetime. It’s a short one, and we don’t get to do too many do-overs.
BY LIZZIE SIMON
PHOTOGRAPHS BY ART STREIBER /MONTAGE AGENCY
styling by Jessica Paster for Celestineagency.com
hair by Campbell McAuley for Soloartists.com
makeup by Joanna Schlip for Cloutieragency.com
| The complete article appears on page 152 in the Holiday 2008 issue of Los Angeles Confidential. SUBSCRIBE NOW and get Los Angeles Confidential delivered direct. |
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