Christina Applegate Reveals ‘I Wanted to Hate Myself Because I Didn’t Feel I Deserved’ a Tony Nomination

Christina Applegate had mixed feelings about one of the most triumphant moments of her career. 

In her candid new memoir You with the Sad Eyes: A Memoir (out now), the 54-year-old actress looked back on her rocky road to Broadway, which culminated in a 2005 Tony nomination for Best Actress in a Musical for her performance in the revival of Sweet Charity. 

“Dance was everything to me, and the chance to dance on Broadway? I could not let this pass me by,” she wrote in the book, adding that what would happen next — breaking her foot during an out-of-town run, when her family and friends had come to see the show — was the “most devastating thing I’ve ever been through.” 

Applegate recalled in You with the Sad Eyes that at one point during Sweet Charity, “I run to the lamppost, take a step, and my heel goes off to the side and… SNAP! That is a bone.” 

The Married... with Children alum had broken her fifth metatarsal and was taken away by EMTs in costume. 

“Sitting in that hospital with my red dress still on, I had a moment of falling apart,” she admitted. “A moment of, ‘Why the f**k did this happen to me?’ Then a mode switched in. A mode that I CAN’T GIVE UP. I can do this. Goddamn it, don’t replace me.” 

Doctors expected it would take 12 weeks for her foot to heal, but Applegate was steadfast in making sure she would be able to dance again in half that time. 

The incident almost caused the production to close before it even opened, with producers announcing that it would not transfer to Broadway following its out-of-town engagements. Applegate did everything she could — including investing $500,000 of her own money — to ensure that Sweet Charity would arrive at the Al Hirschfeld Theatre. 

When the revival officially opened on May 4, 2005, Applegate was met with mixed reviews. 

“Playing Charity, insisting I would do so with a broken foot, and taking a significant financial risk was love made manifest,” she wrote in her memoir. “It wasn’t about ego or Tonys or a better review in the Times; it was about keeping that cast together, keeping them in work and fulfilled, letting their genius shine onstage after all that effort. I couldn’t just let it die.” 

On May 10, 2005, the morning that year’s Tony Award nominations were announced, “I was lying in my bed in my town house on Eleventh Street in Manhattan,” Applegate wrote. “I was living there while performing in Sweet Charity, and as I was luxuriating in a rare late-morning start, I got a beep on my pager. It was a message from my publicist. She had some news.” 

Applegate just found out that she was nominated for her first Tony Award and that the production was also nominated for Best Revival. 

“I let her words sink in,” she said. “I was alone, and I didn’t call anyone. I wanted to really feel it, but I couldn’t — I just couldn’t be excited for myself. Part of me knew that this was the culmination of a life’s dream, my Broadway dream. Another part of me heard that girl from all those years ago saying, ‘You’re doing it.’” 

Applegate remembered getting a call from famed New York Post theater columnist Michael Riedel to congratulate her and ask for her reaction. 

“I thanked Michael for calling and hung up,” Applegate wrote. “I was alone again. I didn’t call my mom. I didn’t call my friends. I did nothing. To call them all to tell them about my Tony nomination would have counted as me ‘doing it,’ gloating, being a pill, embodying the worst of my business, and anyway, I didn’t know how to feel. I wanted to hate myself because I didn’t feel I deserved it.” 

“Truthfully, I have never known how to deal with the fact that I’m a successful person and yet I hate myself,” she candidly admitted. “That breeze called happiness seldom wafted by whatever hammock I was in, and it certainly didn’t blow that morning in Central Park. All I’d ever wanted in my life was to be onstage in a Fosse-inspired show. But then Brantley had attended previews when I still had to sit out parts of the show to save myself for the actual run, and I’d danced the rest on a broken foot, so in being brutally critical he had made me feel that I just wasn’t good enough.” 

When Applegate arrived at the theater that night, she recalled, “The cast and crew whooped and hollered. I looked at them, all these wonderful people. ‘Let’s get ready. Let’s do what we have to do.’”

“Charity was alone, but she had made it,” Applegate said. “She was okay. She did it. She danced on one foot and made something out of nothing.” 

You with the Sad Eyes: A Memoir is currently available.