Some Hollywood soothsayers predicted that Christina Applegate's career would live and die with the role of teen sexpot Kelly Bundy on the long-running Married With Children. With her NBC hit sitcom Jesse, Applegate has proved her critics wrong. After Married With Children ended an 11-year run, Applegate stepped away from television for a few years, reemerging in such studio films as Mafia!, Wild Bill with Jeff Bridges and Tim Burton's Mars Attacks! Applegate also appeared in the independent productions Nowhere, The Big Hit and Claudine's Return, in which she returned to her sexpot image.

Despite her varied movie roles, the Hollywood native realized she missed television. Applegate and her producer-manager of 20 years, Tami Lynn, joined forces with the successful production team behind Friends and Veronica's Closet and came up with the most watched new show on NBC, Jesse, which Applegate co-produces. Although Married With Children plays worldwide in reruns, Kelly Bundy is dead. Jesse Warner lives. And that's the way Applegate wants it.

Robert Crane caught up with Applegate on the Jesse set. He reports: "Entering Applegate's dressing room is like walking into an ashram--incense burning, aromatic candles lit, music playing and Christina sitting on the floor, Robeks juice in hand. It took a nanosecond to adjust to the fact that, damn it, Applegate is not Kelly Bundy. Her first words to me were to ask if she could smoke. Of course she could. Everything else in the room was smoking."

Q 1

PLAYBOY: On Jesse you play a waitress. What is the proper way to treat the waitstaff?

Christina Applegate: Don't say, "Hey." Don't scream across the restaurant, "Can I have the check, please?" Don't raise your finger in the air to summon them. They don't like that. Do listen to them when they recite the specials, because they've been practicing that all day. Poor kids. I've never understood how pubic hair can get into your food. How does that happen? Where does it come from? I don't want to know.

Q 2

PLAYBOY: What are the unforgivable sins committed by a waitperson?

Christina Applegate: Spitting in the food. Let me tell you something that happened. My loved one and I went to a drive-in restaurant, and I had finished my drink and he had his sitting there. There was some left in his, and I went to drink some through the straw. It was really thick, and I then realized that he had hocked a load of spit in there. Having had a big gulp of it once, I know it's not delicious.

Q 3

PLAYBOY: What's a proper tip?

Christina Applegate: Somewhere between 15 and 20 percent, but I like to give 20 percent. Considering that I can't figure out any of that percentage stuff, I just go for 20 percent because it's easy. I mean, who came up with 15 percent? It's too complicated to figure out.

Q 4

PLAYBOY: When the history of comedy television is written, how will Married With Children fare?

Christina Applegate: Married broke the rule of sugarcoated television during its time. TV was so sweet then, it was giving me a cavity. Married changed all that. After us came shows like Roseanne. We definitely opened the door for profanity and vulgarity on television.

Q 5

PLAYBOY: It celebrated emotional brutality and postulated that women are sex crazed and men are stupid. To which part of the population did that series speak?

Christina Applegate: It appealed to all walks of life because even the people who found it offensive found it so only because they were shameful of the things they thought in their own minds. It gave people an opportunity to look at how not to be. They could sit at home and be grateful that they weren't emulating the characters in the show.