She’s After the Other Sweetest Thing

Christina Applegate barely pads in the door of the Coffee Bean on Sunset and pays for her tea when the assault begins. “Oh, no,” she says, ducking her head, her pale eyes searching the busy cafe for a place to hide. A large man in filthy clothes has spotted the former teen star and is yammering at her in a loud voice.

As if that weren’t awful enough, a tall woman with stringy brown hair begins harassing her too. “Hey, I’m bisexual!” she shouts.

The scene is both frightening and telling. For Applegate, it shows the dilemma she still faces in trying to escape her “Married ... With Children” image as just a lusty babe.

It’s an image that gets updated in her new movie, “The Sweetest Thing,” a gal pal comedy that also stars Cameron Diaz and Selma Blair, in which Applegate plays a sexy divorce lawyer named Courtney Rockliffe.

Courtney would probably slap the scary guy at the cafe with a restraining order or at the very least demand that this hirsute giant and his nasty friend get out of her face. But Applegate does no such thing. Looking scared, she gently talks to the man as though he were a disturbed child.

A few minutes later, safely seated at a table outside, Applegate explains that the man, Travis, is a vagrant from her old Laurel Canyon neighborhood. “He used to talk to me forever,” says the 30-year-old actress. “He wants to hang out with me.”

Applegate was then 17, a year into her role as Kelly Bundy on the raunchy sitcom series “Married ... With Children,” and had just moved into her first house after living with her mother.

“There were a lot of vagrants around that area,” she says. “One of them broke into my house. He got arrested. I don’t know if Travis got arrested. But he was in this circle of bad boys who’d hang around and drink and bother people.”

Now calmed down, Applegate finally gets to the reason she’s here: to discuss her new movie.

Dressed in ratty jeans, a tank top and flip-flops, her face bare of makeup, she looks tiny and delicate. She’s also thoughtful, low-key and nice. It’s hard to connect the serious woman sipping tea with the sexpot she played on TV for 11 years.

In “The Sweetest Thing,” which opened Friday and took in $10 million at the box office over the weekend, Applegate and her girlfriends swear a lot, pursue one-night stands and run around in their underwear. In short, it’s single gals in their 20s as you’ve rarely seen them, more “American Pie” than “America’s Sweethearts.”

“I read the script, and I died laughing,” Applegate says. “I loved the way that it really shows the women I know who are stuck in that stage of life where you’re going from being a girl to a woman. You’re looking for more mature relationships, and you’re not really sure how to do that.”

The film is being marketed by Sony as a goofy romantic comedy, so audiences may be surprised by its gross gags and coarse language.

But to Applegate, that’s part of its bracing charm. “Women, I think, talk dirtier than men do behind closed doors,” she confides. “I think women are more willing to use language that isn’t really acceptable with each other. I loved the fact there was that banter.”

Understandably, it’s not a movie she’s going to take her 80-year-old Italian grandmother-in-law to see. “I just don’t think it’s the humor of her generation,” she says. “I think she’d be offended by it.” Her in-laws, however, were to attend the Los Angeles premiere. “So we’ll see if they still talk to me,” she jokes.

Last October, in a small ceremony in Palm Springs presided over by a Catholic priest and a “metaphysical person,” Applegate married her longtime boyfriend, actor Johnathon Schaech, who has a cameo in the movie as a hunk she picks up in a club.

Applegate is the kind of person who says things like: “It’s not what happens to you in this life, it’s what you do with it.” “She’s really got it together,” says “Sweetest Thing” director Roger Kumble. “I don’t think she’d mind me saying this, but she’s a very spiritual person.”

After a trail of largely forgettable movies, Applegate hopes her movie career is finally taking off. Next fall, she’ll appear in “View From the Top” with Gwyneth Paltrow, a comedy about two trailer-park girls and their antics as flight attendants.

Applegate says this is a great time in her life, regardless of the success of her films. “I love being married,” she says. “It’s the biggest joy in the world. I love understanding what love is. And I don’t think any of this,” she says, meaning the movie, “would make any difference in my life if I didn’t have that understanding at home.”

Applegate’s been working almost nonstop since she was little, when her mother took her along on her own auditions because she couldn’t pay a baby-sitter. Her parents, actress Nancy Priddy and former record producer Robert Applegate, split up shortly after she was born, and Applegate lived with her mother. For a time there wasn’t much money..

“The Sweetest Thing” is the biggest movie to date for Applegate, who also starred in the NBC show “Jesse,” which was canceled last year after two seasons. But whether the picture will inspire Hollywood to risk other female-driven comedies is hard to say. Even Kumble, who jokes that he was probably the only guy on the project, isn’t sure.

“This is not a slam dunk,” he said in a phone interview. “Men generally don’t go to see these movies. I think men are going to discover it, but men are not going to rush out to see it.”

To play Courtney, Applegate not only had to vie with dozens of other actresses but also win over Diaz. Applegate isn’t afraid to admit that she really wanted the role.

“I had to do it,” she says, trying to talk over the drone of motorcycles passing by. “I saw Courtney, and I saw so much of myself there. I went through the same phase of life right before I met my husband. I used to call it receiving mode. You don’t go after guys or pay much attention whether it’s going to be a relationship. It’s all about being with your girlfriends and having a good time.”

After reducing the field to a few actresses, Kumble had Applegate do a couple of scenes with Diaz in a suite at the Chateau Marmont. “You could tell she embodied the part of Courtney,” he says. But Diaz, who reportedly got $15 million for the film, had the final say. To make sure the two clicked, Kumble set up a lunch. “I think I said hello,” he deadpans. “About an hour and a half later, I picked up the check. They just hit it off amazingly well.”

“We were kind of all over each other,” recalls Applegate. “Not physically all over each other,” she quickly notes. “At least that’s how I felt. I hope she felt the same way.”

She did. “The first day we met we looked at each other, ‘Let’s be friends,’ like kids on the playground,” said Diaz by phone from New York, where the film had premiered the night before.

“Of course, like most people, I knew her from ‘Married ... With Children.’ I used to always think she was so cool. She’s so sexy and so hot and so funny. She wasn’t just some bimbo. You can’t play that part without having cleverness, which takes intelligence.”

Back in L.A., Applegate is ducking a question about the other two actresses she beat for the part when the woman who demanded her attention earlier wanders up and interrupts. “I just want to know what your sign is,” she says. “Ah, Virgo,” Applegate says. “Really?” says the woman. “That’s a good sign. It’s been a pleasure meeting you.”

After the woman leaves, the actress confides that she’s actually a Sagittarius. “But she didn’t have to know that much about my soul.”

Asked if playing Kelly Bundy for so long perhaps prevented her from being considered for more serious roles, she concedes, “Probably. I think about this a lot because it’s a question I get asked a lot. It was something I never questioned because I had my own integrity. I knew what I was doing as far as this was a character I was playing, and when I went home I was a different person.

“I think people put limits on you,” she goes on. “As long as you don’t believe in those limits, you’re OK. I’m sure there were doors I couldn’t get in to. I’m sure there are doors I still can’t get into. And that’s OK.”