Oprah gets told off!
Now the queen of talk really has heard it all!
Iloved New Zealand!” Oprah Winfrey declares enthusiastically as she talks to Woman’s Day about her time in the South Island filming upcoming movie A Wrinkle in Time.
“Because we were filming, I got to really see the country and was blown away. It seemed like around every corner, there was another breathtaking view and the people were incredibly friendly.”
She could spend the whole day raving about Aotearoa, but that’s not why we’re sharing a pot of coffee with the 63-year-old former talkshow queen in a New York hotel room. We’ve been granted an audience with Oprah to talk about her role in the new TV movie The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, which comes to Sky’s SoHo channel next week.
It’s an emotional rollercoaster, but for the global superstar, the most difficult part was a scene that saw her being violently cursed out by her Aussie co-star Rose Byrne.
“I will tell you now that nobody in my life has ever said to me, ‘Go f*** yourself!’” grins Oprah, seemingly amused to have a legitimate excuse to curse. “The first time Rose said it, it was like an affront to my senses and there was a part of me that wanted to fight back.
“I remember when I did The Color Purple and people called my character the N word – I had a visceral reaction to that too. Even though you are acting, it doesn’t feel good.”
Based on the non-fiction book of the same name by Rebecca Skloot, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks stars Oprah as the daughter of the titular Henrietta, who died of cervical cancer in 1951.
Henrietta’s cancerous cells were harvested without her family’s permission and led to unprecedented medical breakthroughs. The volatile Deborah wants to learn about the mother she never knew, but she struggles as the journey brings up years of physical and sexual abuse. Told that her co-star Rose, 37, who plays author Rebecca, had previously described swearing at her as “intimidating”, Oprah laughs loudly. “She was not intimidated at all,” she insists. “We did that scene all day long, so there wasn’t an angle left to be shot in that room of her telling me to go eff myself.
“There were even a couple of takes we didn’t use of when I walked out of the room. She gave me the finger! I didn’t see that until later.”
Although the media mogul has recently produced two series for her Oprah Winfrey Network studio, her latest TV movie marks a welcome return to acting roles. It was 30 years ago that she was nominated for Best Supporting Actress at the 1986 Oscars for her film debut in Steven Spielberg’s The Color Purple.
Hurt & healing
When Oprah stepped into the shoes of the abused character of Deborah, she reached out to a former student at her Oprah Winfrey Leadership Academy for Girls in South Africa for help.
“This girl is now in college in America and had been through a lot of trauma therapy because she came from an aunt who beat her every day,” tells Oprah.
“I was on my way to set and she’d never talked about it before, but I told her I was getting ready to do this particular scene and I wanted her to help me understand. She told me stories and I said, ‘I will honour your story and Deborah Lacks’ story through the telling of this.’”
Asked how she has healed from her own sexual abuse as a child – something Oprah shared with audiences on her talk show – she says softly, “I never had a day’s therapy because I had it all in front of my audience.”
She adds, “There were hundreds of therapists I interviewed and listened to over the years, and I also did a lot of healing work through other people’s dysfunctional stories. I don’t have a lot of rage any more and I am not an angry person, so it took a lot to feel the rage, pain and fury that Deborah carried with her on a daily basis.”
No longer being tied to her demanding chat-show schedule provides Oprah with much more downtime, she says. However, she’s not keen to divulge the details of a recent trip to Tahiti that saw her staying on music mogul David Geffen’s luxury yacht
with Barack and Michelle Obama, Bruce Springsteen and Tom Hanks.
“We have a code that what happens on the boat stays on the boat, so I can’t tell you what we talked about,” she giggles. “But I can tell you there was lots of eating, lots of conversation and great fun because Tom Hanks is a hoot and we all know how to enjoy ourselves!”