In her new memoir You With The Sad Eyes, out today, Christina Applegate has just told one of the most entertaining Hollywood stories in years, and it involves a then-unknown Brad Pitt, a rock star with long hair, and one very humiliating car ride home from the 1989 MTV Video Music Awards.
Applegate, now 54, writes that she first met Pitt when she was 17, describing him at the time as a “little-known actor named Brad Pitt” in her extended friendship group.
The two were platonic at first before something shifted.
“One day I took another look at Brad and thought, hmm… Apparently, he did the same,” she writes.
Applegate invited Pitt to be her date to the 1989 MTV VMAs. He drove her, her mother Nancy Priddy, and her best friend Lori Allison to the show.
Once inside, Applegate couldn’t take her eyes off Skid Row frontman Sebastian Bach. She describes him as a “long-haired hunk” and spent the entire night staring at him while Pitt waited.
When the show ended, she left with Bach. Not Pitt.
“I felt so powerful and sure of myself for once that when the awards show was over, I left with Sebastian Bach, not Brad Pitt,” she writes. “I hate to put it like this, but Brad back then was still making his way as an actor, and he wasn’t yet THE Brad Pitt, the man of so many people’s dreams.”
Pitt was left to drive her mother and best friend home alone. On the way, he nearly got into a fight with “a bunch of gang members” at a gas station, leaving him, in Applegate’s own words, “very mad.”
The fallout lasted years.
“We didn’t talk for many years after that,” Applegate writes. “Much later, but at different times, two of his movie star girlfriends asked me if it was true that I was the girl who left Brad behind at the MTV Video Music Awards. Brad had apparently told both of them separately that he was still mad at me.”
They eventually made peace. “Eventually, we agreed that I’d been a kid, and though he’d deserved much better, it was time to forgive the child who dumped him for the lead singer of Skid Row,” she writes. Her closing line is perfect: “Of course, Brad is now THE Brad Pitt, and Sebastian Bach… well, he still has long hair, I guess.”
Applegate writes that she regretted her decision almost immediately after discovering that Bach was already in a relationship and had a one-year-old child.
Who Is Christina Applegate?
Applegate rose to fame at 15 playing Kelly Bundy on Fox’s Married… with Children, which ran for 11 seasons from 1987 to 1997.
She went on to star in Anchorman, Bad Moms, won an Emmy for her guest role on Friends, and earned Emmy and Golden Globe nominations for the Netflix dark comedy Dead to Me.
In August 2021, Applegate announced she had been diagnosed with multiple sclerosis.
She finished filming the third and final season of Dead to Me despite the diagnosis, an extraordinary act of determination given that the disease had left her barely able to walk on set.
She has since said that was likely her final on-camera acting role.
Earlier this week she sat down with Robin Roberts on Good Morning America to discuss the memoir.
When Roberts asked where she was in the grieving process of living with MS, Applegate didn’t soften it: “Where am I at with acceptance? Not at all. I hate it. There is no great. There’s a better day and a less s—– day. This is a lifelong disease with no cure. Period.”
The memoir You With The Sad Eyes is out today and covers her full life, from a tumultuous childhood in Laurel Canyon to her decades in Hollywood to her MS battle.
