Rosie O'Donnell Says She Turned Down Woody Allen Role Twice Because She Isn't 'Under His Spell'

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Back in the 1990s, Rosie O'Donnell made it abundantly clear to Woody Allen she had no desire to appear in one of his movies.

While she was a guest on The Howard Stern Show Sept. 12, the 60-year-old actress, comedian and former talk show host revealed she rejected two offers to work with the now-86-year-old Oscar-winner, who has long faced accusations of sexual abuse.

"I had done an HBO special where I said everything about him," O'Donnell told Stern, according to Entertainment Weekly. "And then I got on my [talk] show. So it's the first year of my show [in 1996] and I get a call and they said, 'He wants you to be in [1999's Sweet and Lowdown]. I said, 'Please send him my HBO special.' And the woman said, 'Oh he's already seen it.' And I said, 'Send it anyway with two words: F--- and no.' And I sent it to him."

His team didn't get the hint, she continued: "They called back and said, 'He really wants you to do it. He'd like to talk to you about it.' I said, 'I'm not doing it. I'm not working for him or with him and being associated with him.' "

O'Donnell also said that Allen "had a lot of people under his spell," but she wasn't one of them. Sweet and Lowdown, starring Sean Penn, Uma Thurman and Samantha Morton, was made without O'Donnell's participation.

RELATED: Drew Barrymore Says She Was "Gaslit" Into Working with Woody Allen in 1996

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Allen was first accused of sexually abusing his daughter Dylan Farrow during his explosive 1992 split from longtime partner Mia Farrow, now 77. Allen has denied allegations of abuse and was never charged with a crime, though a Connecticut prosecutor said there was probable cause for a criminal case.

O'Donnell has been outspoken about the situation for more than two decades. In her 1995 HBO special, O'Donnell lambasted Allen, who split from Farrow after the actress discovered nude photos of her adopted daughter, Soon-Yi Previn, who was in her early 20s at the time, in Allen's apartment.

"Can you believe the nerve of this guy? Showing up in public with his lover-slash-daughter," O'Donnell said. "Incest, Woody. It's a word. Look it up. Pedophile. What a concept. Ever hear of it?" (Allen and Previn wed in 1997 and have two adopted daughters.)

Dylan Farrow's accusations against Allen resurfaced in 2014 when she penned a New York Times piece detailing her ordeal. Days later, O'Donnell returned to The View following her 2006-07 stint co-hosting the daytime talk show. During the Hot Topics segment, she said, "I firmly believe Dylan and I believe Mia."

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After Barbara Walters defended the Annie Hall director as a good father at the time, O'Donnell countered, "You can never really know what's going on in a house."

O'Donnell's public stance against Allen led to a friendship with Mia, she told Stern. "She heard that story [about rejecting the chance to work with Allen] and she called me to see if it was true and I said, 'Oh yes, it's true.' And she started to cry and said, 'Even my closest friends didn't stick behind me during this and that here you did your HBO special and now you did this. I'm forever in your debt.' "

Allen recently defended himself in a 2020 interview that was released on Paramount+ last year, calling the accusations "preposterous." He said, "They still prefer to cling to if not the notion that I molested Dylan, the possibility that I molested her. Nothing that I ever did with Dylan in my life could be misconstrued as that."