Rosie O’Donnell Addresses Her Infamous Spoiling of ‘Fight Club’: ‘I Had No Idea I Had Even Done It’

Jude Dry
·3 min read
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Having gone 10 rounds and then some against Donald Trump, Rosie O’Donnell isn’t afraid of Brad Pitt and Edward Norton. The former daytime talk show host notoriously spoiled the ending of “Fight Club” during an episode of “The Rosie O’Donnell Show” back in 1999, when the David Fincher film was newly released in theaters. Though the Tyler Durden twist is now infamous, once upon a time a person could walk into a movie theater and be completely surprised by the ending.

During an interview with “The Jess Cagle Show” on Sirius XM radio, O’Donnell finally addressed the snafu, though she stopped short of an actual apology.

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“I was just talking because I didn’t think [‘Fight Club’] was good and the ‘Sixth Sense’ was out. I don’t know. It annoyed me, the movie,” she said. “So I was saying — ‘the ‘Sixth Sense’ makes sense, but this one doesn’t make sense because of the thing at the end is sorta well, I don’t wanna say, but listen — that’s what I did.”

The movie’s creative team, including Pitt and Norton, were all upset with her, though it certainly didn’t seem to affect the movie’s ticket sales.

On the DVD commentary for “Fight Club,” released in 2000, Pitt said: “I guess that is OK she hated it. She was saying, ‘This movie disturbed me,’ she could not sleep for nights. It hit a nerve. It struck some nerve whether she wanted to look at it or not. But the deal was, she gave away the ending on national television. That’s just unforgivable.”

According to O’Donnell, she had no idea what she had done, or that anyone was mad at her.

“I didn’t realize. Nobody said jack shit to me for a good three years, maybe even four years,” she said. “And Courtney Love on my show says, ‘Oh, my God, Ed Norton and Brad Pitt are so mad at you for what you did.’ I was like ‘What did I do?’ It was three years later! She was like, ‘You ruined the ‘Fight Club’ ending,’ and I only found out a long time after the incident.”

Regardless of how she feels about her right to express her opinion on her own talk show, O’Donnell doesn’t deny what she said.

“People do sometimes ask me on the internet whether or not I did it. And I did. I didn’t have, like, ‘Oh, my God. I want to hurt these people.’ I just had my normal blathering on about feelings of the movie. So apparently I was loathed by the men in that for a long time, possibly still. But I had no idea that I had even done it,” she said. “I guess I ruined it for the people who worked so hard on it, and I should be more careful with what I say in a negative way about a movie. If you don’t like it, just don’t mention it. That would have worked better.”

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