Christina Applegate wants you to know that she's never threatened to eat children, despite her new Super Bowl commercial
Actress Christina Applegate’s latest role, playing the referee to several squabbling M&M’s candies in a Super Bowl ad, was easy for her to imagine. She’s a mom.
“I used to drive three kids to soccer every Thursday for a couple of years, and I know what that’s like to have three children in your car,” Applegate tells Yahoo Entertainment. “I know what it’s like to have to pull over and be, like, real, real serious. Although I’ve never threatened to eat the children…”
The Anchorman star’s 8-year-old daughter, Sadie, with husband Martyn LeNoble, is often “bonkers” in the backseat of a car, Applegate says. Sadie is also crazy about candy, to the point where Halloween is her favorite day of the year.
Applegate’s ad, introducing new M&M’s Chocolate Bars, is her first for the NFL championship. Commercials have always been her favorite part of the whole thing anyway. She sees them as “tiny movies” designed to pull out emotion, whether it be laughs or sobs.
“I love a Super Bowl ad. I’m not gonna lie. I love watching them online,” Applegate says, adding that she doesn’t often watch sports. “I grew up with a single mom, so it wasn’t an influence in my house. My house was, like, there was always a piano being played and a dance class to go to so I gravitate more towards that.”
“But,” she jokes, “I was married to someone who, we watched the Super Bowl.”
Applegate was married to actor Johnathon Schaech from 2001 to 2007.
Besides Schaech, her past includes the Fox sitcom Married With Children, on which she played the scantily clad Kelly Bundy, and the teen movie classic Don’t Tell Mom the Babysitter’s Dead. She starred as Sue Ellen “Swell” Crandell, a teenager masquerading as an executive in that one. Would she ever be interested in a reboot of those titles?
She doesn’t see how she would fit into a Babysitter update and as for Married With Children … just, no.
“I’m going to be 50 in two years,” Applegate says. “Nobody wants to see me in a minidress. Nobody needs to see saggy-kneed, 50-year-old Kelly Bundy.”
And don’t try telling her that she doesn’t have saggy knees.
“It’s what happens when you’re almost 50 years old, unless you’re Halle Berry, and then, apparently … She’s an enigma. These knees are not gonna be shown in a minidress ever again.”
The actress will be playing one of the main characters in an upcoming Netflix series, Dead to Me, which she also produced.
“It’s a very dark, emotional, sad, suspenseful … comedy?” Applegate says. “[Co-star] Linda Cardellini and I had to cry so much, and sometimes we’d be doing these scenes and they’re like really super emotional and they’d be like, ‘That was so great. That was so funny, you guys.’ Linda and I would look at each other, like, [sniffles] ‘What? What was funny about that? We’re conjuring up all of our demons right now, and I don’t see what was funny.’ Apparently, it’s hilarious.”
Most of the time, though, Applegate is focused on being a mom, which she says has been her “main job” since Sadie was born.
“If my Netflix show gets picked up [for a second season], then I’ll work again in the fall, but other than that, I like my time with my daughter, and that’s what I’m doing,” she says.
Carpool notwithstanding.
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