Now that she’s quit her day job, Oprah Winfrey is looking to rekindle an old passion. The former talk show queen is looking to make a comeback to the big screen, and has been speaking with some of her closest filmmaker pals about possible roles.
“For years, I couldn’t do it …,” Winfrey says to Variety. “If a film comes along that I feel really speaks to me, I would do it … I am the most relaxed I have ever been in my life doing a film because it’s the only real vacation I get [and] I no longer have to be myself … I just love the opportunity to submerge into somebody else’s life and not to have to deal with my own for a while,” she added.
The profile went on to mention she’s “talking to helmers Tyler Perry, Lee Daniels and [Jonathan] Demme about potential roles.” Winfrey had also recently announced she’s been in chats with Broadway producers about starring in a stage production.
Oprah’s last screen role was in 1998’s Beloved. She is currently attached to star in a project about the inner workings of a home shopping channel alongside Meryl Streep and Sandra Bullock, from Sex and the City producer and director Michael Patrick King, and an HBO original film called Ruined, based on Lynn Nottage’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play about a Congolese madam who fights to keep the women in her brothel safe.
