Oprah Winfrey has moved on from her job as a contributor at 60 Minutes.
The media mogul, who appears on the new cover of The Hollywood Reporter, said in the accompanying article she decided to leave the CBS news program because she couldn’t be herself.
“I’m no longer doing that. I’ve removed myself from that,” Winfrey answered when asked how she juggles all of her jobs, including her gig at 60 minutes.
“How should I say this?” she responded when pressed for details on why she left the show. “Never a good thing when I have to practice saying my name and have to be told that I have too much emotion in my name.”
Winfrey said because of the way the show is produced, she began putting less of her personality into her work.
“I think I did seven takes on just my name because it was ‘too emotional.’ I go, ‘Is the too much emotion in the Oprah part or the Winfrey part?'”
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She said the experience brought back memories of her days as a young news reporter.
“I had a deja vu moment because I’ve actually lived through this once before when I covered a story as a young reporter [where] the family had lost their home and my boss told me that I reported it with too much emotion,” she recalled. “I had too much emotion in the story. I thought, ‘OK, so you’re not supposed to be involved in the story, I get that. You’re a journalist.’ But the same thing is true even with a read [at 60 Minutes]. They would say, ‘All right, you need to flatten out your voice, there’s too much emotion in your voice.’ So I was working on pulling myself down and flattening out my personality — which, for me, is actually not such a good thing.”
Despite leaving the program, she still plans to work with some of the employees in the future as part of her production deal with Apple.
“It was an interesting experience for me. I enjoyed working with the teams, and I’m probably going to work with some of the freelance people on my Apple stuff, but it was not the best format for me,” she said.
Winfrey joined 60 minutes in 2017.
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