Christina Applegate is opening up about cruel remarks she’s gotten over the years about her appearance ― unwelcome comments that she says started when she was only 27 years old.
The “Dead to Me” star opened Tuesday’s episode of her podcast “MeSsy” — which she co-hosts with her friend, actor Jamie-Lynn Sigler — by discussing her “weird insecurities about my aging [and] how I look.”
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Applegate, 52, said her lack of confidence stems from an incident that occurred in the late 1990s — around the time she was ending her stint as the ditzy bombshell Kelly Bundy on “Married with Children.”
“At 27 years old, I was on a show,” she recalled to Sigler about 10 minutes into the episode. “And one of the producers… said, ‘Hey, we’re having trouble lighting under your eyes. Your bags under your eyes are so big.’”
Applegate explained that the undereye bags were a “hereditary thing,” and even joked to Sigler that her father has “got, like, Louis Vuitton luggage under his eyes.”
She said the producer suggested she get the bags under her eyes surgically removed, and she obliged.
“The only plastic surgery I’ve ever had was to remove the bags under my eyes,” Applegate said. “I went under, and I had them removed, at 27.”
The “Anchorman” alum went on to emphasize how much the ordeal still affects her self-esteem, making her feel “shame” about her appearance because of “the things people just plant, these seeds they plant into your head.”
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The “Bad Moms” actor also spoke about an instance that occurred in her 40s, when a director criticized her looks. Applegate said she was redoing audio for a movie she was in, which meant she had to continually rewatch scenes of herself on screen in order to sync the new audio with her lip movements.
Applegate said she was struggling to re-record her lines for one scene because she thought her face looked saggy in a particular frame they kept on pausing on.
“They paused it, and it was like Jowl McJowlton,” Applegate said. “I was like, ‘Ugh, I hate that. Please stop pausing it.’ And the director goes, ‘Yeah, I know, we had to spend a lot of money to fix that.’”
“And I went, ‘What?’ He goes, ‘Yeah, the studio was really upset.’ And he goes, ‘Yeah, I mean, I told them, it’s like, she’s not Kelly Bundy anymore,’” Applegate continued.
The “Don’t Tell Mom the Babysitter’s Dead” star said the director went on to tell her that the studio spent “a couple hundred thousand dollars” to “fix my face.”
“I suffered inside from that, because I didn’t know I was so ugly that they had to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to erase my face,” Applegate said.
Applegate said the director apologized to her soon after he made those remarks, and that she is still friends with him.
“You can forgive,” Sigler told Applegate, “but we can call out a bad behavior.”
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It’s not only people in the entertainment industry who have gone out of their way to criticize Applegate’s appearance. In 2023, Applegate posted a screenshot of a comment from an online troll who claimed that her face looked like it had been worked on by a “bad plastic surgeon.”
Applegate is dealing with much more pressing matters than her appearance nowadays — especially after announcing in 2021 that she has multiple sclerosis. Recently, the Emmy-winning actor said her neurological condition, which can affect speech, vision and mobility, has also led to depression.
“Like, a real ‘fuck it all’ depression… where it’s kind of scaring me too, a little bit, because it feels really fatalistic,” Applegate said on her podcast in June.
Applegate said on her podcast Tuesday that she’d like to get plastic surgery to enhance the way she looks now. But, she said, she’s been turned down by a few plastic surgeons.
“A lot of doctors won’t do surgery on you once you have MS, because they’re afraid of complications,” Applegate said.
“What you see is what you get now, man,” she said. “I don’t know what else to do.”