Rosie O'Donnell Says Her 'Now And Then' Character Was Supposed To Be Lesbian

Curtis M. Wong
·3 min read

Twenty-eight years after appearing in “Now and Then,” Rosie O’Donnell is sharing some surprising insight about her role in the coming-of-age comedy.

Speaking to Brooke Shields on Tuesday’s episode of the “Now What?” podcast, O’Donnell was asked whether she’d ever sign on for a sequel to the 1995 film, in which she played the adult version of Christina Ricci’s character, Roberta Martin.

Noting she’d “love” to appear in a follow-up, O’Donnell said Roberta was originally written as a lesbian, but references to the character’s queer sexuality were removed from the movie after it had been shot.

“My character was gay. She was a lesbian,” O’Donnell said. “And in the film, I’m very close to Rita Wilson’s character, and I’m a gynecologist and I’m delivering her baby. And then I look up from catching the baby and I say to her, ‘I love you.’ You know, just friends, not as a lover. And when they showed the film, the producer said, ‘Let’s take out that she’s gay.’ And they took every little, tiny thing that I had done to build the character into an accurate gay woman and made her straight.”

Though O’Donnell hadn’t yet come out publicly as lesbian when “Now and Then” was released, she said that she was upset by the decision, and suggested it was yet another example of just how marginalized queer themes were in pop culture at the time.

“I was like: ‘This can’t be really happening. Is this really happening?’ But you know, this was before ‘Will & Grace,’” she said. “This was before Ellen [DeGeneres] was out. And it was very controversial to be gay and — my agent didn’t know if I should take the job because ‘What if people find out that you’re gay?’ And I was like, ‘Come on, I’m an actress.’”

Shortly after the interview went live, a representative for O’Donnell issued a statement to Entertainment Weekly and other outlets clarifying that she meant to say that the studio, rather than an individual producer, made the final call about Roberta’s sexuality in the movie.

HuffPost has reached out to representatives for New Line Cinema as well as “Now and Then” director Lesli Linka Glatter seeking comment on O’Donnell’s remarks.

Watch the trailer for “Now and Then” below.

It isn’t the first time that O’Donnell has alluded to behind-the-scenes disagreements regarding the on-screen sexuality of one of her famous roles.

Speaking to Vanity Fair last year, she said that she and director Penny Marshall clashed over whether Doris Murphy, her character in 1992’s “A League of Their Own,” would be a lesbian.

“There were gay women or athletic women or women like her, and my character, I thought, was in love with [Madonna’s character] Mae and didn’t maybe know how to express it,” O’Donnell explained. “But it was 1991 when we shot it, or 1990, and the times were different.”

She went on to praise Amazon Prime Video’s “League of Their Own” reboot series for embracing queer storylines.

“It just touches me to see what [series co-creator Abbi Jacobson] has done and how she incorporated the reality of the Black women in the league and the gay women in the league, and kind of opened it up to a 2022 worldview,” she said.

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