Oprah Winfrey has been recalling how her first appearance on The Tonight Show back in 1985 ended up being traumatic after guest host Joan Rivers body-shamed her by telling her to “lose 15 lbs.”
Speaking on The Jamie Kern Lima Show podcast, the Oscar-nominated actress and media mogul revealed how she appeared on the late-night show around the time when she thought she’d just lost out on a role in Steven Spielberg‘s The Color Purple due to her weight.
While she was on The Tonight Show to talk about her program, A.M. Chicago, the conversation soon turned to Winfrey’s size.
“Joan Rivers turns to me, and she says, ‘Tell me why are you so fat?’” Winfrey told Lima, per People. “On national television… and I don’t know what to do with that. I just did, like, ’Oh, I just love potato chips, Joan.’”
Winfrey continued, saying Rivers told her, “Shame on you,” and “I’ll let you come back if you lose 15 lbs. You need to lose 15 lbs.”
The legendary talk show host went on to say that at the time, she agreed with Rivers and felt like “I should be shamed.”
“She says to me on national television,” Winfrey added. “And I accept it. I accept that I should be shamed, because how dare me, be sitting up here on The Tonight Show.”
On the show, Winfrey said she “agreed that I was gonna go away and lose 15 lbs. And of course, I didn’t lose the 15 lbs.. I went and ate my way to another 10 lbs.”
The A Wrinkle in Time star revealed how she later went to a “health retreat,” which “at the time, they called them fat farms,” to try and lose weight. While there, she received a phone call from Spielberg that changed the course of her life.
Winfrey said the director called and said, “‘I hear you’re at a fat farm…. You lose a pound. You could lose this part [in The Color Purple].’”
The award-winning author said the phone call was a full-circle moment, because she’d previously “let go” of the role before Spielberg called to tell her she was still in the running.
“The instant I let it go was the greatest life lesson I have ever received, because I physically felt the release,” she stated. “The second I did that it changed.”
Winfrey would go on to land the role of Sofia in The Color Purple and earned an Academy Award nomination for her performance.
“That became my grounding teaching for the rest of my life and career,” she concluded. “Do everything you can, work as hard as you can, and then let it go.”