Christina Applegate is serious about comedy

Christina Applegate made her television debut at the age of 3 months with her mother, Nancy Lee Priddy, in the soap opera "Days of Our Lives." But she hit TV stardom playing Kelly Bundy, the dumber-than-dumb blond daughter on the long-running series "Married ... With Children."

She has since proved herself to be more than just a pretty face, starring in the 1998-2000 NBC comedy series "Jesse" and in such feature films as "The Sweetest Thing," "Employee of the Month" and "Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy." She also won an Emmy for her guest-starring role as Rachel's sister on "Friends."

Applegate, 36, took Broadway by storm in 2005 with the revival of the musical "Sweet Charity," receiving a Theatre World Award and a Tony nomination. Now she's made a triumphant return to series television as the star of this season's hit comedy "Samantha Who?" on ABC, in which she plays a 30-year-old executive who suffers amnesia after a hit-and-run accident and must rebuild her life, her relationships and herself. Jennifer Esposito plays her best friend; Jean Smart and Kevin Dunn costar as her parents.

Applegate's work on the show brought her nominations for a Golden Globe and a Screen Actors Guild Award.

Congrats on the Golden Globe and Screen Actors Guild Award nominations.

We are all very happy about it. We look upon it as a team effort.

You're one of the producers on the show?

Yeah, a quieter one than most, but I have some say in some things.

Had you been offered series over the years?

I actually hadn't been open to the idea of it since "Jesse." Things would come to the agency and not go any further than that just because I wasn't interested in doing that.

Was that because "Jesse" only lasted two seasons?

That was plenty for me. For me, it did what it needed to do for me professionally as well as just personally. It helped me get all the jobs that I did after that. It opened up people's perceptions, I believe, that I wasn't that 18-year-old girl anymore, I was actually a grownup. That definitely helped.

After I got back from 'Sweet Charity' I wanted to take some time off. I wasn't really looking for anything to do. It seemed to me there weren't a lot of good films being made, and if there were, they weren't for me.

This was my first year I said to my agency, "Let's open up to pilots, let's see what's kind of going on in that world." I had noticed that television had gotten a lot better and there were a lot of female-dominated roles. I actually looked at a lot of dramas and comedies, and I wasn't really moved by anything.

But this came along, this was the last pilot in before the pilot season would have been over. And I just felt it was really clever and I wanted to see what this Don Todd [executive producer-writer-creator] guy was about. He had this amazing rapier wit about him. He is also just incredibly smart and wanted to make sure the show was grounded in reality, but funny in a smart way. At that point, they had Jennifer Esposito and they were in talks with Jean Smart, so I knew the standard they were looking for was high.

Samantha is such a fun character because she was such a horrible person before she had the amnesia.

I hadn't seen anything like that. The amnesia stories happen mostly in soap operas, but to explore it in a funny way and with this person finding herself ... I like the idea of building a personality and building memories.

This is a really hard subject matter to write episodes for and for the [writers] to be able every week to come up with scripts that are original and not depending solely on the amnesia joke and to find humor in other parts of this person's life.... I know we had a lot of people saying, "How long can this go on, this amnesia thing?" But if you look at the episodes, only the first couple dealt with that. Now it is really about Samantha and the relationships with the people in her life.

"Married ... With Children" and "Jesse" were shot in front of a studio audience, but "Samantha Who?" is filmed without one. Is it more difficult to do comedy when you don't have the response from an audience?

It's always more difficult. Even doing all the movies I have done too, like with "Anchorman," when so much of that is dependent on a reaction -- especially with "Anchorman," which is just so kind of outlandish -- you really do want an audience to know if you have gone too far with something.

It is always difficult to gauge when you are doing comedy. There's an energy to funny, I guess, and if it is one second off or one second too long -- it has to be right in that pocket for it to really work. So that's always difficult. But I put all my trust into Don and our other supervising producers who are always on set, and our directors.

When you approach a comedic character, do you try to make her fun or keep her in reality?

Trying to make it funny, you'll fail entirely. For me, and really for anyone who does this, you have to approach this as if you are doing Chekhov. You have to ask all the same questions as if you were doing anything else, but then you kind of have to step back and do -- what I always say -- "twinkle above it," which is just lightening it up a little bit, just take it a step out of reality, and know that people are just funny.

In fact, I can't take [any project] unless it has a sense of humor about itself. Any show or movie, regardless of what it is, if it takes itself too seriously I have a hard time kind of getting into it. You look at Meryl Streep -- she's so brilliant, but if you really look at it, she doesn't take herself seriously. She has this element about her. That is why she's the master of what she does.