Christina Applegate Is in Her Honesty Era: ‘I’m Scared as Shit, Man’

Coming Clean Christina Applegate Is in Her Honesty Era: ‘I’m Scared as Shit, Man’ With her unvarnished memoir, the Married… With Children and Anchorma n star is revealing the sometimes painful reality of her life off set over her 40-year career By Elisabeth Garber-Paul Elisabeth Garber-Paul Contact Elisabeth Garber-Paul on X View all posts by Elisabeth Garber-Paul March 3, 2026 On the surface, Christina Applegate ’s first big movie, Don’t Tell Mom the Babysitter’s Dead , and her final acting project, Dead to Me , have a thematic connection: In each, a woman must deal with unexpected death, and handle, quite frankly, a lot of dead bodies. In both, Applegate’s characters — one a teenage girl trying to feed a pack of siblings, the other a middle-aged mother raising two sons — rise to the occasion, and do whatever is necessary to protect their families. In both, arguably, they come out on top. But when I make this observation during a recent conversation, Applegate doesn’t find the coincidence so amusing. “I have lost so many people to heroin addiction, friends — those are the dead bodies,” she says, suddenly serious. The commonality she sees instead is how both projects arrived during times of massive pain in her life: While filming Don’t Tell Mom , she was in the middle of a three-year emotionally abusive relationship. While she was on Dead to Me , she was diagnosed with Multiple Sclerosis , a degenerative and incurable autoimmune disease that can cause mobility and muscular issues, among other symptoms, effectively ending her acting career. “I mean, that’s all I can say about those two things.” Applegate spent a lot of time thinking about these two moments, and dozens of important ones in between, while writing her new memoir , You With the Sad Eyes , out March 3 . The Anchorman star has been known throughout her four-decade career for her disarming smile and cutting wit, both of which she often weaponized to deflect from her personal life. There was the decade, star...