Christina Applegate reveals why she left Brad Pitt
Christina Applegate remembers the time she dumped Brad Pitt after taking him as a date to an awards show and instantly regretted it.
In her new memoir “You With the Sad Eyes,” which was released Tuesday, the “Dead to Me” star, 54, recounted the time she invited an early-career Pitt, whom she said they had already been “platonic friends.” [with] for longer,” at the 1989 MTV Video Music Awards in Los Angeles.
Shortly before asking him to be her date, Applegate said she “took another look at Brad and thought” he might be boyfriend material, stating that he felt the same way and agreed to go with her.
Applegate was 17 at the time and at the zenith of Hollywood fame after landing the beloved role of Kelly Bundy on “Married… With Children.”
Despite having budding heartthrob Pitt by her side at the awards ceremony where she presented that night, she couldn’t help but set her sights on rocker Sebastian Bach, who was also at the show.
“I spent the whole night staring at Bach, who was then a long-haired hunk fronting the band Skid Row,” Applegate wrote, according to several outlets. “I hate to say 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 so many people dream of.”
Applegate, who wore a Ceil Chapman dress to the ceremony that she said made her feel so “incredible,” added that she felt “so powerful and confident for once that when the awards ceremony was over, I left with Sebastian Bach, not Brad Pitt.”
“And it gets worse: Brad had to grumpily drive my mother… home,” he continued.
The night continued to plummet from there after “Brad almost got into a fight with a group of gang members and, unsurprisingly, subsequently got very angry with me.”
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Applegate admitted that her knee-jerk reaction to leaving Pitt for Bach backfired: Shortly afterward, she discovered at a party afterward that night that Bach was already spoken for and had a son.
“What an idiot,” Applegate wrote.
The “Anchorman” star said Pitt “didn’t speak” to her “for many years” after the debacle, and had even complained about the nightmarish date with Applegate to “two of his movie star girlfriends.”
“Much later” in life, she said the two women, whom she did not name, asked her if she was “the girl who left Brad behind at the MTV Video Music Awards.”
Luckily for Applegate, Pitt was able to bury the hatchet.
“In the end, we agreed that I was a girl and even though he deserved so much better, it was time to forgive the boy who left him for the lead singer of Skid Row,” she wrote. “Of course, Brad is now THE Brad Pitt, and Sebastian Bach… well, he still has long hair, I guess.”
The Netflix star married Johnathon Schaech in 2001 before separating in 2007. In 2013, she married her now-husband, Martyn LeNoble, after welcoming their daughter, Sadie Grace LeNoble, in 2011.
Pitt was married to Jennifer Aniston from 2000 to 2005. He then married Angelina Jolie in 2014 and they divorced in 2019. The “Mr. & Mrs. Smith” star is currently dating jewelry executive Inés de Ramon, with whom he has been romantically linked since late 2022.