Dr. Phil Defends Controversial Interview With Shelley Duvall

Dr. Phil, whose real name is Phil McGraw, recently defended a 2016 interview he conducted with actress Shelley Duvall that caused significant controversy for the TV personality.

The host of Dr. Phil sat down with journalist Chris Wallace for CNN's Who's Talking to Chris Wallace and began discussing the infamous interview. During their conversation, Wallace referenced how viewers believed McGraw and his show "exploited" Duvall and her mental illness before asking, "Do you regret what you did there?"

McGraw quickly responded, "I don't regret what I did. I regret that it was promoted in a way that people thought was unbecoming."

He went on, "There are parts of that story that I haven't talked about and won't talk about in specific, but I can say generally that we worked with her family [and] with her for over a year off camera, after the fact, providing her opportunities for inpatient and outpatient psychiatric care. I can't tell you the extent we went through."

Along with that, McGraw responded to the people who felt like his show was "showboating the visibly ill," criticizing them for attacking him when they likely didn't do anything to help Duvall themselves.

He said, "And the people that were critical of it, nobody ever asked them what they ever did to try and help her. And the answer is not a damn thing."

During the original 2016 interview, Duvall made comments about believing that Robin Williams was still alive because he was a shapeshifter and that the fictional Robin Hood character, the Sheriff of Nottingham, was threatening her while also saying, "I'm very sick. I need help."

After the interview, Vivian Kubrick, the daughter of director Stanley Kubrick, wrote on Twitter, "You are putting Shelley Duvall ‘on show’ while she is suffering from a pitiable state of ill health. Unquestionably, this is purely a form of lurid and exploitative entertainment – it’s appallingly cruel."

In Feb. 2021, Duvall told The Hollywood Reporter that she agreed to be on the show before she "found out the kind of person [McGraw] is the hard way." The article also stated that Dr. Phil producers attempted to reach Duvall and offer her access to treatment on numerous occasions, but she declined.

Two decades after she retired from the entertainment industry in 2002, Duvall officially returned to the big screen in the 2023 horror film The Forest Hills. (Ironically, the Dr. Phil TV series announced it would halt production that same year).

Since her reemergence in Hollywood, Duvall suggested this is just the beginning. "It's been great. It really has, it feels good," she told ET reporters this past winter. "Makes me want to do more acting."

Duvall concluded, "It's actually so much fun to act in a movie, I should appreciate every minute of it."