Kathleen Turner has a lot to say—in her signature rasp, of course—about Burt Reynolds. And Nicolas Cage. And the cast of Friends. And, oh, just about every other star she’s worked with over the course of her legendary career. In a lengthy interview with Vulture posted Tuesday, the actress shared her unfiltered thoughts about an array of peers, starting with some shots at the late Elizabeth Taylor. In 2005, Turner starred in a Broadway production of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? playing the same role Taylor did in the film adaptation. The part won Taylor a best-actress Oscar. When asked if she watched the film to prepare for her own performance, Turner didn’t whiff: “God, no,” she responded.
“For a while I felt like half my life was making her wrongs right,” Turner continued. How so? Well, because Turner played several roles that Taylor had previously performed—with a “bad voice, badly used.” Turner added that she doesn’t think the actress “was very skilled,” pinpointing a scene in Virginia Woolf that she thinks Taylor and co-star/husband Richard Burton badly misinterpreted. Shot No. 1, fired.
Shot No. 2: a triptych of Michael Douglas, Jack Nicholson, and Warren Beatty, actors Turner characterized as lascivious cads betting to see who could romance her first. “None of them did, by the by,” she added.
But none of those stars were as difficult to work with as Burt Reynolds, according to Turner, whom she acted alongside in the 1988 comedy Switching Channels. “Working with Burt Reynolds was terrible,” she said. “The first day Burt came in he made me cry. He said something about not taking second place to a woman. His behavior was shocking. It never occurred to me that I wasn’t someone’s equal.” At least Reynolds never bit Turner—as another, unnamed actor once did during a scene in a play. (Reader, his character was not supposed to bite her character.) Turner responded by slapping him in the face. The actress didn’t name names this time around, leaving us to piece this one together ourselves. Beyoncé-gate, but make it theater.
Turner also erred on the side of discretion while comparing her career to that of an unnamed peer who “has played the same role for many years. She even looks pretty much the same. She’s probably one of the richest women out there, but I would shoot myself if I were like that, only giving people what they expect.” Already, Twitter theories abound about this mysterious unnamed actress. Could it be Diane Keaton, who loves a meta role? Julia Roberts? Jennifer Aniston? The possibilities are endless—though if Turner had been talking about a mystery man, the answer would most definitely be Tom Cruise.
Turner did, however, get specific again when describing her time opposite Nicolas Cage in Peggy Sue Got Married (directed by Cage’s uncle, Francis Ford Coppola). When she found out Cage was going to speak with a strange, nasally voice throughout the shoot, she went up to Coppola and bluntly asked, “You approved this choice?”
“[Cage] was very difficult on set,” she continued. “But the director allowed what Nicolas wanted to do with his role, so I wasn’t in a position to do much except play with what I’d been given. If anything, it [Cage’s portrayal] only further illustrated my character’s disillusionment with the past. The way I saw it was, yeah, he was that asshole.”
When asked to clarify whether she meant the actor or the character, Turner replied, “Listen, I made it work, honey.”
If your heart rate is racing right now, that’s because this interview is the equivalent of gossip calisthenics. It’s a masterpiece in the art of talking shit after earning the right to do so, following a long and distinguished career that took a turn after Turner was diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis in 1992. The pain medication and steroids the actress used to treat her condition changed her physical appearance, damaging her self-esteem and her status in a physique-obsessed industry. “I suppose there was a feeling of loss,” she told Vulture, after her film career dried up. “Rheumatoid arthritis hit in my late 30s—the last of my years in which Hollywood would consider me a sexually appealing leading lady. The hardest part was that so much of my confidence was based on my physicality. If I didn’t have that, who was I?” Thankfully, Turner dug her heels in and worked to regain her confidence, tabloids be damned—all leading up to this moment, when she could come out swinging without fear of facing consequences for burning bridges.
There are still so many left to be dragged, and such little time! In the interview, Turner also recounted the time she shook hands with Donald Trump—a thing, among many, that he’s famously bad at doing. “He goes to shake your hand and with his index finger kind of rubs the inside of your wrist,” she said. “He’s trying to do some kind of seductive intimacy move. You pull your hand away and go yuck.”
And finally, she also recalled her time on the Friends set (she played Chandler Bing’s father in several episodes), saying she “didn’t feel very welcomed by the cast,” mostly because they were such a tight-knit crew. When asked what she thought of their acting skills, she chose, for once, to take an understated approach: “I won’t comment on that.”
