“Joan Rivers turns to me and says, ‘Tell me, why are you so fat?’” Oprah said the late comedian told her during her appearance on ‘The Tonight Show’ in 1985.
Oprah Winfrey is trying again at the time she was shamed by the deceased Joana Rios on national TV.
On Monday’s episode of Jamie Kern Lima’s Gift podcastthe TV icon recalled being interviewed by the late comedian in The Gift of the Night in 1985, and opened up about her response when Rivers criticized her for her weight.
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“I was embarrassed The Gift of the Night by Joan Rivers. I got my first look at The Tonight Show,” Oprah began, adding that they had been envisioned to discuss the success of her Chicago-based talk show.
“Joan Rivers turns to me and he or she says, ‘Tell me, why are you so fat?’ … on national TV,” she continued. “And I don’t know what to do with that. I’m just like, ‘Well, I just love French fries, Joan.’ She’s like, ‘No, seriously! How embarrassing! How embarrassing!’”
The 70-year-old TV personality claimed Rivers told her she would only return to the late-night show if she lost weight.
“‘I’ll let you come back if you lose 30 pounds. It’s advisable to lose 30 pounds,’ she tells me on national TV,” Oprah recalled. “And I accepted. I accept that I should be shamed as a result of how I dare to sit here in Tonight’s gift.“
The previous show’s host said she “had agreed that she would go away and lose 15 kilos”, but that didn’t happen.
“I didn’t actually lose the 15 pounds. I went and ate my way to another 10 pounds,” she explained.
At the time, Oprah claimed that she had already auditioned for the 1985 film. The Purple Coloration, however, she hadn’t heard anything, so she assumed she didn’t get the job because she was “chubby” and decided to go to a wellness retreat, which was then known as “fat farms.”
During the retreat, Oprah began to accept that the role wasn’t going to work for her, until she received a phone call from the film’s director, Steven Spielberg.
“I cried and prayed some more, and the second I felt the release… a girl comes in working out and he or she says, ‘There’s a phone call for you,’” she recalled. “The phone call from Steven Spielberg saying, ‘I heard you’re on a fat farm. If you lose a pound, you can lose half that.’ The fact that it happened the second I knew I was going to let it go was the best life lesson I’ve ever gotten.”
“I felt the release in my body, and I noticed that the second I did that, she changed,” Oprah continued. “The second I stopped resisting, the second I stopped questioning, the second I stopped putting myself in the house of worry and said, ‘It’s effective. Use me however you choose to use me.’ I assumed that was the answer, but now I see that it’s not. I’m eager to be open to wherever you’re taking me.’ The moment I did that, I saw that woman.”
“This has shaped my basic education for the rest of my life and profession,” she concluded. “Do everything you can, work as hard as you can, and then let it go.”
Oprah, after all, was finally forged as Sofia in The Purple Colorationand later received an Oscar nomination for his performance.
The media icon has been open about her struggles with her weight over time. In February, Oprah made the choice to step down after a decade of serving on the board of directors of Weight Watchers after revealing her current use of weight-loss medication.
The following month, she got candid insights into her decades-long weight loss journey in a TV special entitled An Oprah Special: Shame, Guilt, and the Weight Loss Revolution.