Archive for the 'Interviews' Category

Christina Applegate isn’t mincing words: She “was quitting” acting prior to landing her role on Netflix’s Dead to Me.

“Let’s be honest. I was like, ‘I’m done.’ I didn’t want to do it anymore,” the Emmy nominee tells EW on the latest episode of The Awardist podcast, crediting Dead to Me creator Liz Feldman for seeing her for more than what she was being offered.

On the final season of the “traumedy,” as Applegate says costar Linda Cardellini described the show’s genre, Applegate’s Jen and Cardellini’s Judy deal with the escalating police investigation into Steve’s (James Marsden) death. If that wasn’t enough, Judy is battling cancer, which she eventually finds out is terminal, and Jen is shocked to learn she is pregnant by Ben, Steve’s twin brother (naturally, James Marsden). Through it all, Jen and Judy’s friendship never wavers — they are the epitome of “ride or die.” In fact, they ride together to Mexico, where the two spend a few days together before Jen wakes one morning to discover that Judy has — seemingly — left to spare Jen the grief of watching her friend die.

While the series has wrapped and viewers (mostly) know what happened to the two characters, Applegate isn’t as certain about what fate awaits her. Five years ago she was ready to quit the industry because of a lack of good roles coming her way; now, she is more worried about her professional future because of MS, which she learned about while filming season 3 of the show. While the production made accommodations, their kindness, she says, set the bar “pretty high” and she’s hesitant to think any others “would have that kind of understanding.”

Below, read portions of our interview, where Applegate reveals whether she has any unfinished business with Jen, how the show became an escape for her, whether she still finds comedy difficult after years of starring in comedic shows and movies, her inspirations, and more.

There’s a moment in the final episode of Dead to Me, Netflix’s dark comedy about best friends, murder, and a luxurious backyard pool, where a terminally ill Judy (Linda Cardellini) lies in bed alongside her partner in crime, Jen (Christina Applegate), and says, “I’ve had the best time.” To which Jen replies, “I know. Me too.” You’d have to be acutely dehydrated to not well up.

For Applegate, the tears flowed on that final day on set, and again when she revisited the memory last week during this interview. “It was knowing the journey the two of us had been on, not just as those characters, but as two dear friends and acting partners,” she said.

It’s hard not to look at that scene as another goodbye, with Applegate now saying she may leave behind acting on camera because of the challenges of living with multiple sclerosis. Nearly two years after her diagnosis (she found out she had MS while filming Dead to Me’s final season) and less than a week after a hospital stay, she looked back at the show’s final season, paying tribute not just to Cardellini but also to James Marsden, who played twins on the show, and the show’s creator, Liz Feldman. Excerpts from a conversation with an icon who’s utterly honest and zero-fucks-to-give-funny.

Vanity Fair: The final season of Dead to Me came out late last year but it’s back in the conversation because of the first Emmy-voting window. Does the show feel like a lifetime ago, or do you still think about Jen?

Christina Applegate: It feels like a hundred years ago at this point, just because it kind of was, and it was such a trying and taxing time for me to even film. So I think I just had to get away from it all, you know? I miss my friends. I miss Linda. I miss Liz. I miss James. I miss the experience of it, but at the same time, because it was such an incredible struggle this last year, I’m relieved that I no longer have to push so hard to get through my day.

How are you feeling today?

With the disease of MS, it’s never a good day. You just have little shitty days. People are like, “Well, why don’t you take more showers?” Well, because getting in the shower is frightening. You can fall, you can slip, your legs can buckle. Especially because I have a glass shower. It’s frightening to me to get in there. There are just certain things that people take for granted in their lives that I took for granted. Going down the stairs, carrying things—you can’t do that anymore. It fucking sucks. I can still drive my car short distances. I can bring up food to my kid. Up, never down.

Because MS affects your balance?

Yeah, and gravity can just pull you down and take everything down with you. So we have this little thing at the top of the stairs that we call “purgatory.” So if anyone’s done with anything upstairs, we put it in purgatory so one of my able friends can bring it downstairs.

You have a group of able friends who come by to help out?

No. I know that sounds like, “Yay!” But I actually don’t want to be around a lot of people because I’m immunocompromised. I have my friend who lives here during the week and she helps me take care of [12-year-old daughter] Sadie. And then on the weekend I have a caretaker. I also don’t want a lot of stimulation of the nervous system because it can be a little bit too much for me. I like to keep it as quiet and as mellow as possible.

Sometimes even the most well-meaning visitors…

It’s exhausting. Imagine just being in a crowd of people and how loud that is. It’s like 5,000 times louder for anyone who has lesions on their brains.

There are moments this season where we watch Linda’s character, Judy, battle a disease while knowing that in real life you are actually the person battling one. In one scene, Jen is looking in the mirror and talking to her reflection about troubling shadows on a scan. It felt very meta to watch. How was it to play those moments?

It was bizarre. Especially since the season was written over a year before this all was shot. So it was almost like a portent. None of us knew I was going to be sick and gain 40 pounds from medication and have immobility. It was really difficult to not have my own personal feelings shadow what Jen was feeling. A lot of the words were really difficult to say and a lot of the scenes were really difficult to do. I had to keep remembering that this is Judy’s disease. It was really hard to not take that on, especially when the words were so cathartic and so right-to-the-bone.

The dark comedy “Dead to Me,” which completed its third and final season on Netflix, is a riot of heartbreak, comedy, mayhem and wild plot twists. Star Christina Applegate can relate all too well.

She plays real estate agent Jen Harding, prickly on her best days, and raging with grief after the death of her husband. Jen’s path crosses that of Linda Cardellini’s Judy Hale, a free-spirited artist who’s holding her own pain, along with one hell of a secret. Themes of friendship and loss play out in unexpectedly personal ways from the moment the two women meet.

That could also describe the actors’ relationship. “I cry when I talk about Linda because I love her so much,” says Applegate, speaking by phone from her Los Angeles home. “The next person who gets to work with her, I hope they realize how incredibly lucky they are, because not only is she an incredible human but she’s a divine artist and is right there, present for you, no matter what.”

In the middle of shooting the show’s last season in 2021, Applegate began having leg pain and tremors. She was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. After a break in filming to absorb the news and begin treatment, she insisted on returning to complete the series. The actor, who’s been working practically since birth, had to rely on others as never before, letting the production know what she could and couldn’t do. “They were incredible,” she says of the crew, led by creator and showrunner Liz Feldman, whom she calls “Jen and Judy combined into a human, in the most perfect and beautiful way possible.”

Applegate notes she has never worked harder on a job. “I was a wreck every day, but most of that wreck would take place in my trailer by myself. But there were times I’d break down on set and be like, ‘I can’t, we have to take a break, I need a half-hour,’ and everyone was so loving that it was OK.”

Despite the difficulties, she was buoyed by moments on set with Cardellini, and scenes between the two of them took on added resonance. “There is really never a moment when Judy and Jen are talking to each other that it wasn’t Linda and Christina talking to each other,” Applegate says. “The set disappeared, everyone kind of disappeared, and it was the two of us as best friends, supporting each other, loving each other and saying goodbye to each other. I’d like to say there was skill involved, but really, Linda and I just disappeared.”

She explains that throughout the series, the two have held each other up during rough periods in their lives. This last season, “She literally pulled me under her wing and protected me, and took care of me every single day,” Applegate says. “Also the tables were turned: Jen is taking care of her friend who’s dying, yet Linda was taking care of me as I was saying goodbye to the person that I’d always known — so part of me was dying.”

With comedic timing honed over four decades, Applegate then turns on a dime: “But no, it’s skill, because I’m nominated for a SAG Award, it’s skill! Skill! Technique! Skill!” she shouts, before dissolving into laughter. (She’s been nominated for female actor in a comedy series three times in a row for “Dead to Me.”) “Please put ‘ha ha’ after ‘skill,’ because I don’t want people to think I’m sitting here tooting my own horn. It’s a joke.”

She joined the Screen Actors Guild in 1975; this is her sixth nod. “When you go to that particular event, it’s all your people — you don’t have anybody but the actors there. And despite the reputation actors have, everyone is really lovely.” Her daughter Sadie will be her date, mostly because the 12-year-old hopes to meet her idol, Natasha Lyonne.

“It’s my last awards show as an actor probably, so it’s kind of a big deal,” Applegate says. “Right now, I couldn’t imagine getting up at 5 a.m. and spending 12 to 14 hours on a set; I don’t have that in me at this moment.” She’s considering next steps: producing, development, “doing a s— ton of voice-overs to make some cash to make sure that my daughter’s fed and we’re homed.” And she spends a lot of time in bed, bingeing all the reality shows she’s never seen.

But it took months before she could watch her own show’s last season. “I don’t like seeing myself struggling,” she says. “Also, I gained 40 pounds because of inactivity and medications, and I didn’t look like myself, and I didn’t feel like myself.” She watched alone, stopping periodically when it became too painful. “At some point I was able to distance myself from my own ego, and realize what a beautiful piece of television it was. All the scenes I wasn’t in were so much fun to see and experience for the very first time.”

If Jen Harding is, indeed, Applegate’s last role, it’s a masterful way to go out — a culmination of all her experience, hard work, love, commitment and, yes, skill. No joke.

Source: LA Times

Christina Applegate began acting as a small child, but when “Married … With Children” premiered on Fox on April 5, 1987 as the nascent network’s first primetime show, she officially began her 35-years-and-counting career. After playing the iconic dummy Kelly Bundy for 11 seasons, she went on to other starring roles on television (“Jesse,” “Samantha Who?” and “Dead to Me”), in film (in the “Anchorman” and “Bad Moms” movies, most notably) and was nominated for a Tony for the 2005 Broadway revival of “Sweet Charity.”

For this work — and much more — Applegate, 50, will receive a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame on Nov. 14. It’s the fulfillment of “a lifelong dream,” Applegate said, one born out of standing on the Walk of Fame while waiting in line as a kid to see movies on Hollywood Boulevard. “I remember going, ‘I want to have one of these!’” she recalled. “My whole childhood was like that — wow, these stars.”

The ceremony will also mark Applegate’s debut in public “as a disabled person,” she said. She was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis in 2021, and because of that illness, filming the final season of “Dead to Me” became a near impossibility: After all, she could barely walk. Yet “Dead to Me” — created by Liz Feldman, and costarring Linda Cardellini — will in fact premiere on Netflix on Nov. 17, after Applegate determinedly fought her way through filming the tragicomedy’s third and last season.

“Dead to Me” has always been about women’s friendships, and Season 3 of the show will reflect that more than ever. “It kind of became profound in its own sense,” Applegate said about bringing “Dead to Me” to its conclusion. “It was really Linda and I talking to each other a lot. Moments that were real.”

In a recent interview with Variety, Applegate discussed her career, working with MS, whether “Dead to Me” is her final starring role — and being a co-founder of the Pussycat Dolls.

When Christina Applegate looks back, she can recognize the signs. Filming a dance sequence during the first season of the Netflix wine-mom dramedy “Dead to Me,” she found herself off balance. Later, her tennis game began to falter. At the time, Applegate, an actress with an aversion to special pleading, didn’t make excuses. She had to work harder, she told herself. She had to try again.

“I wish I had paid attention,” she said during a recent video call from her home in Los Angeles. “But who was I to know?”

Over several years, the tingling and numbness in her extremities grew worse. And in the summer of 2021, on set for the third and final season of “Dead to Me,” she received a diagnosis. She had multiple sclerosis, an autoimmune disease that disrupts communication between the brain and body. Production shut down for about five months as she began treatment.

“There was the sense of, ‘Well, let’s get her some medicine so she can get better,’” Applegate, 50, recalled. “And there is no better. But it was good for me. I needed to process my loss of my life, my loss of that part of me. So I needed that time.”

“Although it’s not like I came on the other side of it, like, ‘Woohoo, I’m totally fine,’” she added. “Acceptance? No. I’m never going to accept this. I’m pissed.”

This was on a recent morning. Applegate was sitting up in bed — her happy place, where she watches reality television. (“That’s my meditation,” she said.) She had pulled her hair into a scrappy bun. Black glasses sat astride her nose. And her resting face did have a certain indignant quality.

But she wanted to do this interview, because the last season of “Dead to Me” arrives on Netflix later this month, on Nov. 17.

“This is the first time anyone’s going to see me the way I am,” she said. “I put on 40 pounds; I can’t walk without a cane. I want people to know that I am very aware of all of that.”

In truth, her illness is nearly invisible onscreen — a feat of savvy blocking and Applegate’s talent and resolve. Still, she wanted to offer context.