Hollywood actress Christina Applegate has opened up about her many regrets, including how she handled her 2008 interview with Oprah Winfrey about getting a double mastectomy, in her latest memoir, You With the Sad Eyes.
During her appearance on The Oprah Winfrey Show, Applegate spoke about her breast cancer journey but apparently didn’t reveal how “broken-hearted” she was about her double mastectomy, something she later regretted.
The Dead to Me star wrote:
“Frankly, I was disgusted by what came out of my mouth. It was my way of coping with how broken-hearted I was to lose my breasts… To this day, I feel emotionally and physically mangled by what I went through, but the organization mitigates the terrible loss I felt and feel. But there are other ways I know I hurt instead of helped, both others and myself.”
Christina Applegate, 54, continued in her memoir that instead of choosing that moment to “share the truth,” she said that the surgery was a “blessing.” The actress claimed that fellow breast cancer survivor and musician Melissa Etheridge considered a double mastectomy a “blessing” and reportedly told her how she got to “start over” and “change everything.”
However, looking back, neither did she agree with her, nor was her experience any less traumatic. Applegate explained:
“Here’s how I feel about that interview now. It was bullsh*t. I had lied, thinking I was being uplifting. I was acting like Little Ms Warrior, but that’s not how I really felt. There I was, talking about f**king blessings when they were going through a living hell. I was setting up a paragon that no one going through cancer could ever rightly live up to.”
Christina recalled that the truth was that she was “alone, sad, and mourning” the loss of her breasts, which was one of the “most intimate and devastating amputations,” adding no amount of plastic surgery/ implants can ever “make up for it.”
Exploring Christina Applegate’s interview with Oprah Winfrey
In April 2008, a routine MRI revealed that Christina Applegate had early-stage breast cancer and also carried the genetic trait called the BRCA1 mutation, which increases cancer risk. In the wake of the diagnosis, Applegate decided to undergo a double mastectomy despite having cancer in one breast. She has been cancer-free ever since.
A month after her surgery, the Married… With Children actress sat down with Oprah Winfrey and gave a lengthy interview. She began by saying how, for the first five weeks, she lived “quietly” and continued to work without telling anyone what she was going through.
Christina Applegate explained how, as a daughter of a breast cancer survivor, she has been getting mammograms since she was 30. Later, in 2007, her doctor advised her to also get frequent MRIs for better precaution.
The first MRI itself revealed something was wrong in her left breast. After getting a biopsy done, she waited in anticipation for the result. However, her worst nightmare came true when it came back positive.
The Samantha Who? actress told Oprah how she went into “survival mode” despite learning that her cancer was in an early stage.
“Right now, I’m sitting here shaking, remembering that moment,” she added.
Christina Applegate mentioned that she was ready to start treatment and to get a single mastectomy. However, when the BRCA gene test also came back positive, she weighed her options and chose to go for a bilateral mastectomy.
“It came on really fast. It was one of those things that I woke up, and it felt so right. It just seemed like, ‘I don’t want to have to deal with this again. I don’t want to keep putting that stuff in my body. I just want to be done with this.’ I was just going to let them go,” Applegate explained.
She told Oprah that she also got her only n*de photoshoot to remember her breasts.
“I made sure that I have close-up photographs of them from every angle so I can kind of remember them,” Christina Applegate added.
Finally, when she revealed her decision to her doctor, and they met with a surgeon, it opened “floodgates” and she “lost it.” In June, she got the surgery, the recovery of which she said was “painful.”
“It’s also a part of you that’s gone, so you go through a grieving process and a mourning process,” Christina Applegate noted.
While she admitted life without her breasts didn’t “feel the same” and she cried “at least once a day,” she was “grateful” to have taken a proactive decision. She continued:
“It’s hard to overlook it when you’re standing there in the mirror. When you look down, it’s the first thing you see… So, you’re reminded constantly of this thing—this cancer thing that you had… But I have taken a very progressive stance in the rest of my life. For that, I’m really grateful.”
Christina Applegate also joked at the time that, on the brighter side, she would never have to wear a brassiere again. She mentioned embracing her saline expanders and waiting for her breast implants.
Elsewhere, the Jesse alum recalled how going under the knife was terrifying as her mother’s double mastectomy wasn’t that good of a job when it happened in the 1970s. However, the constant threat of living with cancer and after researching implants, aka “pretty b**bies,” she was finally convinced that she could go through with it.
Christina Applegate also revealed her interaction with Melissa Etheridge and said the singer changed her outlook. She told Oprah:
“[There’s] this need and this desire to make every single day count. I used to say… ‘Don’t sweat the small stuff—not even the big stuff.’ At the end of the day, none of it matters but your own joy, your own spiritual journey that you go on, God, your loved ones, your friends, your animals. These are the things you’ve got to cherish and love and embrace.”
Christina Applegate also pledged to raise awareness about early-stage breast cancer detection and help others, especially high-risk and underprivileged women, to afford regular screenings. Since then, she has also launched her own organization for the cause.
Today, she chooses to be absolutely honest about her medical conditions, including multiple sclerosis, an autoimmune disease that has impacted her life and career. In her new memoir, Christina Applegate wrote:
“I’m not going to lie anymore. MS sucks. It’s not like you can get rid of the cancer, get breast reconstruction and move on, which was certainly how I described my journey to Oprah, Robin [Roberts] and others. We need to stop ramming blessings down the throats of people in distress. That’s not how we help people. We help people by radical, thoughtful honesty.”
Christina Applegate was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis in June 2021. She hasn’t appeared on-screen since the final season of Dead to Me came out in late 2022 on Netflix.
Edited by Pallavi K