Rosie O’Donnell Reveals She Turned Down Woody Allen Role Amid Controversial Director’s Retirement Claim

Rosie O’Donnell turned down a chance to work with Woody Allen twice, she told Howard Stern. She also shot down an opportunity to meet Michael Jackson for the same reason. Both Allen and Jackson remain controversial figures due to abuse allegations against them. Allen, 86, plans to retire from filmmaking after he finishes his 50th movie.

On the Sept. 12 episode of The Howard Stern Show, O’Donnell said Allen wanted him to star in his 1999 movie, Sweet and Lowdown, which earned Sean Penn and Samantha Morton Oscar nominations. “I had done an HBO special where I said everything about him,” O’Donnell began, via Entertainment Weekly. “And then I got on my show. So it’s the first year of my show and I get a call and they said, ‘He wants you to be in [Sweet and Lowdown].” O’Donnell told Allen’s team to have him watch her HBO special. Even though he had seen it, he still wanted her in the movie. “I said, ‘Send it anyway with two words: F— and no.’ And I sent it to him,” O’Donnell recalled.

However, this was not enough to get Allen’s team to stop pursuing her. “They called back and said, ‘He really wants you to do it. He’d like to talk to you about it,’” she recalled. “I said, ‘I’m not doing it. I’m not working for him or with him and being associated with him.’”

As for Jackson, O’Donnell said she was at a wedding the singer attended. His guards told her he wanted to meet her, but she was not interested. “Finally they said, ‘He’s going to come over here,’” O’Donnell recalled. “I said, ‘Well, tell him not to because I’m a member of the Children’s Defense Fund and I believe every accusation against him.’ And he didn’t come over.”

Allen was accused of sexually abusing his adoptive daughter Dylan Farrow in 1992 when she was seven years old. The allegations were investigated by Connecticut police amid a bitter custody battle between Allen and Mia Farrow. Allen was not charged with a crime and he has always denied the allegations. The allegations were most recently covered in the HBO documentary series Allen v. Farrow.

O’Donnell believes Allen was bothered that he couldn’t use his power in Hollywood to convince her to work with him. “He had a lot of people under his spell,” she said. Her refusal to work with Allen also led to a friendship with Farrow.

“She heard that story 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,’” O’Donnell told Stern. “I said, ‘You’re not in my debt at all, but you are my friend and I admired you for years and what you’ve done with your life.’”

Over the weekend, Allen told Spanish newspaper La Vanguardia that he plans to retire after he finishes his next movie, which will be set in Paris and filmed in French soon. He compared the new film to Match Point and said it will be “exciting, dramatic and also very sinister,” notes Variety. Allen also has a new book coming out, Zero Gravity, which will be published by Arcade in the U.S. Allen has been forced to work in Europe lately, as his financial support in the U.S. has dried up since 2018. His most recent film, Rifkin’s Festival (2020), was supported by Spanish media giant Mediapro and did not get a theatrical release in the U.S. until a very limited run in late January 2022.