If there’s any way to piss off the guys from Fight Club it’s to break their one rule: don’t talk about it. Apparently Rosie O’Donnell did just that back when it first came out and ruffled some major feathers. Over 20 years after star Brad Pitt called her out for it, O’Donnell has addressed the transgression of spoiling the now-iconic film and the fact that stars Edward Norton and Pitt were pretty angry with her when she did it.
While it sounds like a pretty messed up thing to do, not only spoiling a major ending to a huge film but also simultaneously breaking the one rule the film has, it would seem that Rosie O’Donnell had no clue what she was really doing when she went on her show and ruined the ending for everyone watching. In a recent interview with Sirius XM’s The Jess Cagle Show, the long-time comedian and TV personality revealed that all she actually did was say the ending didn’t make sense to her when talking about how much the movie “annoyed” her. Here it is in her own words:
I just did it, because I was just talking and I didn’t think it was good. And The Sixth Sense was out, and I don’t know. It annoyed me, the movie. It just annoyed me. So I was saying The Sixth Sense makes sense, but this one doesn’t make sense.
Rosie O’Donnell is definitely known for having pretty much no filter when it comes to what she says, so it's easy to believe her when she says she was just doing what she naturally does and didn’t realize it was something much bigger. Apparently there weren’t many consequences to her words either, because no one told her a thing about it until it had pretty much blown over, at least 3 years later. In the same interview, O'Donnell says it was actually Courtney Love who dropped the bomb on her:
Nobody said jack shit to me for a good 3 years, maybe even four years. And I meet Courtney Love 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.’ I was like ‘What did I do?’ This is 3 years later. She said, ‘You ruined the Fight Club ending.’
While it looks like Rosie O’Donnell was unaware that she ruined the ending of Fight Club, Brad Pitt was hyper-aware. In fact, Brad Pitt’s annoyance at O’Donnell spoiling the ending of his cult classic hit film made it into the DVD commentary. Here’s exactly what Pitt said on the commentary (via Indie Wire) about the talk show host ruining the wild ending of Fight Club:
I guess that is OK she hated it. She was saying, ‘This movie disturbed me,’ she could not sleep for nights. It hit a nerve. It struck some nerve whether she wanted to look at it or not. But the deal was, she gave away the ending on national television. That’s just unforgivable.
Brad Pitt’s feelings were, of course, super valid, but that was quite a long time ago. Rosie O’Donnell does say that she has spoken with Edward Norton since then and everything seemed gravy. It’s very possible that Pitt has also put the past behind him, especially now that O’Donnell has come forward with her side of the story, which makes it seem like the whole thing was just a misunderstanding. What’s a little decades old spoilage between 3 wealthy Hollywoodians, am I right?
