Advertisement

Rosie O'Donnell talks about the time she spoiled the ending of 'Fight Club': 'I had no idea that I had even done it'

Rosie O'Donnell received backlash from fans of
Rosie O'Donnell received backlash from fans of "Fight Club." (Photo: Dia Dipasupil/Getty Images)

Rosie O'Donnell broke the first rule of Fight Club, which — as fans of the 1999 movie of the same name know — is that you do not talk about Fight Club.

It happened in October of that year, as she delivered a negative review of the David Fincher film on her highly rated talk show, The Rosie O'Donnell Show, after watching an earlier screener. It wasn't so much that she disliked it, but that she compared it to The Sixth Sense, which was also in theaters at the time and also had a twist ending.

People were unhappy, but she didn't realize it for a while in a pre-Twitter age.

"So, apparently, I was loathed by the men in that, possibly still, but I had no idea that I had even done it," O'Donnell said Tuesday on SiriusXM's The Jess Cagle Show, when she was asked about the situation.

But she didn't know it for a while.

"Nobody said jack shit to me for a good three years, maybe even four years — and I knew Courtney Love. She says, on my show, she says to me, 'Oh my god... Ed Norton and Brad Pitt, they're so mad at you for what you did,'" O'Donnell said. "I was like, 'What did I do?' It was three years later! She says, 'You ruined the Fight Club ending.' I only found it out a long time after the incident."

Even then, O'Donnell was skeptical.

"When Courtney Love said that to me, I thought, 'She's lost her mind. She's out there still. You know, what's wrong with her? She's not... What is she talking [about]? Ed Norton is mad at me? Is she out of her mind?' And, apparently, it's true."

O'Donnell said she still gets questions from fans on the internet about whether she had intended to upset people, but she insisted that she had just been "blabbering."

"I guess I ruined it for the people who were, you know, who had worked so hard on it, and I should be more careful with what I say in a negative way about a movie," she said. "You know, if you don't like it, just don't mention it. You know? That sort of would have worked better."

O'Donnell didn't care for the movie at the time — "I didn't think it was good" — but she actually has little memory of it all now. At first, she couldn't recall who'd co-starred alongside Norton.

Speaking of which, she said she thinks that he's past it now.

"He's done my radio show since," she said, "so he must have forgiven me."

Norton did not immediately respond to Yahoo Entertainment's request for comment.

Read more from Yahoo Entertainment: