The horror movie that made Oprah Winfrey eat 30 pounds of mac and cheese: “I’m not kidding”
Different people deal with disappointment in different ways, and one of the wealthiest and most well-known television personalities on the planet, Oprah Winfrey, coped with box office catastrophe by deciding to load up on enough mac and cheese to feed a small army.
Oprah doesn’t act very often, but when she does, it tends to be in productions she’s deeply invested in. A case in point was her big screen debut in Steven Spielberg’s The Color Purple, which earned her Academy Award and Golden Globe nominations for ‘Best Actress’.
Subsequent roles in the literary adaptation Native Son, the miniseries The Women of Brewster Place, the spinoff Brewster Place, and the made-for-TV biopic There Are No Children Here furthered Oprah’s acting aspirations, but when her career as a small screen force of nature really took off, acting gigs became fewer and farther between.
From that point on, she’d only sign up for parts she couldn’t turn down, and she was confident she’d landed one in Oscar-winning The Silence of the Lambs director Jonathan Demme’s gothic psychological drama Beloved, which hit cinemas in October 1998 and served as her first theatrically released acting performance in a dozen years.
Unfolding in late 19th-century Ohio, Winfrey takes top billing as a woman traumatised by her past and the methods she used to secure freedom. The former slave’s home has been haunted by a demonic entity for over a decade until Danny Glover’s old acquaintance and Thandiwe Newton’s mysterious title character arrive on the scene to further complicate an already tetchy situation.
A blockbuster genre film carrying an $80 million budget hailing from the filmmaker who turned Hannibal Lecter into an icon boasting an American national treasure in the lead had success written all over it until Beloved‘s opening weekend rolled around, and it crashed, burned, and died a death in multiplexes nationwide.
In what was a busy weekend, the film could only debut in fifth. Sandra Bullock and Nicole Kidman’s Practical Magic debuted at number one, the animated comedy Antz held onto the third spot in its third week of release, and fourth went to Jackie Chan and Chris Tucker’s Rush Hour, even though it had been playing for five weeks.
However, it was the title that took second place that really stuck in Winfrey’s craw, to the point that mac and cheese became her only escape from a cruel and unforgiving world. “I remember hearing that we got beat by something called Chucky,” she reflected, per Entertainment Weekly. And I didn’t even know what Chucky was.”
Chucky was, of course, the killer doll who was making his fourth appearance in Bride of Chucky, which handily beat Beloved in ticket sales, and sent Oprah into “a massive, depressive, macaroni and cheese eating tailspin.” How much of a tailspin? Well, according to her, she requested 30 pounds of the stuff from her personal shift, intoning with a stern, “I’m not kidding,” that she wasn’t inflating those figures for dramatic effect.
Everyone has their own vices, and for Oprah, being embarrassed at the box office by a murderous plaything was reason enough to barrel through enough macaroni to make an Italian weak at the knees.
