Oprah Winfrey and Forest Whitaker once co-starred as husband and wife for the critically acclaimed feature The Butler.
But Winfrey was worried about some odd details when it came down to her and Whitaker’s sex scenes.
What worried Oprah Winfrey about her sex scenes with Forest Whitaker
The Butler was a 2013 film directed by Lee Daniels. It was based on a real-life butler that took care of presidents in the white house for decades. Whitaker played the titular role, whereas Winfrey would be paired up with the esteemed actor as his wife Gloria. Winfrey hadn’t acted at the time since her starring role in Steven Spielberg’s The Color Purple. But Daniels persuaded her to do his movie several years later.
“Lee was relentless. I remember being on my mountain in Maui, where I go to try to restore myself. And he called saying, ‘You need to get ready, because you are Gloria.’ So I did it to have the opportunity to work with Lee. I also did it because Gloria represented to me every woman of that era who sacrificed herself … never bringing her own dreams to fruition because family took precedence over everything,” Winfrey once told Parade.
When it came down to doing love scenes with Whitaker, however, Lee confided that Winfrey could be a bit difficult. If only because Winfrey seemed to question unusual details about her and Whitaker’s intimacy.
“Oprah is just full of questions. I couldn’t answer enough questions. They’re in the bed — it’s the scene where she and Forest were together and they’re making love. So she looks around and she says, ‘What time is it?’ I said, ‘It doesn’t matter what time it is.’ ‘What time is it, Lee?’ I said, ‘It doesn’t matter. You’re getting laid. Shut up!’ She pulled the covers up over her head,” Daniels once recalled according to Vulture.
Oprah Winfrey refused to strip down for ‘The Butler’
At one point in the film, Daniels envisioned Winfrey’s character sporting nothing but a bra and panties. It’s one of a couple of times that Daniels and the media mogul didn’t see eye to eye on set. Initially, Daniels felt he wasn’t going to budge on his execution of the scene.
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“And I was not going to let her talk me out of it,” he said.
But Winfrey would soon convince the Empire creator that keeping her clothes on was truer to her character.
“First of all, she’s a mother and she loves her husband, so she’s not gonna be sitting up in the middle of the day watching her soaps in her bra and panties, smoking. And once she does, the audience can never forgive her,” she said.
Oprah Winfrey told Forest Whitaker’s wife ‘I’m trying to build a relationship’ with him while doing ‘The Butler’
As Whitaker’s on-screen wife, the media mogul wanted the relationship to come off as authentic and genuine as possible on the big screen. To do this, Winfrey would often flirt in subtle ways with Whitaker to create intimacy.
“I wanted to have real chemistry [in the film]. I would just sort of ease my way over and then go behind him and rub his shoulders and just stand there and rub his shoulders,” Winfrey once told Loose Women. “Sometimes sitting on set I would purposely go and sit next to him, I would put my hand on his knee and start rubbing his knee.”
But she only proceeded with her strategy after getting the okay from Whitaker’s wife.
“I called his wife first and said ‘You know, I’m trying to build a relationship.’ And it actually worked,” Winfrey remembered.
