Oprah Winfrey has revealed why she declined to appear in new musical reimagining of The Color Purple.
While she did consider making a cameo in the new film, Winfrey, who starred in the original movie alongside Whoopi Goldberg, recently told The Hollywood Reporter why she ultimately decided not to.
“[A cameo] would’ve been good in the church scene, but I thought it would also be distracting when Sofia is getting married that if the old original Sofia was just one of the people in the church,” Winfrey told the outlet. “And then they were shooting that in the middle of Georgia when COVID was [spreading] like, ‘OK, well I ain’t sitting in that church all day anyway.'”
Many fans of the original The Color Purple were excited to see Goldberg, who played Celie in Steven Spielberg’s 1985 version, make a surprise appearance.
“And also I just think it’s more special that it’s just Whoopi,” Winfrey, who starred as Sofia in the original, added of her reason behind not appearing in the film.
Movie screenwriter Marcus Gardley said he created a midwife character for Goldberg as a way to pass the torch from Spielberg’s original to the new film.
“Symbolically, that felt like the perfect part because she’s the one to not only encourage her during the birth, but it’s like she herself gave birth to the role and now we see her passing it down,” Gardley said.
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