Oprah Winfrey only agreed to be in ‘Selma’ after learning her character used to watch her talk show while eating tuna sandwiches.
The 60-year-old star appears as civil rights activist Annie Lee Cooper in the drama movie – based on Martin Luther King’s 1965 Selma to Montgomery voting rights marches, at which Annie punched Selma sheriff Jim Clark – but had reservations because she didn’t want to play a person who hit someone.
Despite her concerns, director Ava DuVernay managed to convince the talk show host thanks to the fishy tale about Annie watching ‘The Oprah Winfrey Show’.
She said: "I was like, ‘I’m not going to do that. I’m not going to play another person who punches somebody out.
"’In every movie, do I have to punch somebody out?’ And then Ava sent me [a story] from Google about the real Annie Lee Cooper that said she watched the Oprah show every day.
"Not only watched, but watched it with a tuna fish sandwich – which is exactly how I would want to watch it.
"Ava said, ‘What do you think it would mean to this woman who watched you every day?’ She got me! She got me. So it was like, ‘Yeah, maybe I’ll do that.’ "
Oprah was initially an unofficial advisor on the movie after her ‘The Butler’ co-star David Oyelowo, who plays Martin Luther King in the motion picture, informed her about the film, and he later encouraged her to take a producer role on the project but she was not keen to do so much work.
She added to E!: "I was like, ‘Producer? I don’t want to do that. That means I have to actually work.’
"I said, ‘I’ll just tell you from behind the scenes what to do.’ "
Oprah Winfrey’s tuna sandwich agreement
