Whoopi Goldberg exposes stars who rejected her Oscar-winning roles

Whoopi Goldberg has pulled back the curtain on Hollywood, revealing the big-name stars who turned down roles she later landed.

In the new two-episode Apple TV+ documentary Number One on the Call Sheet, the 69-year-old actor and comedian quipped, "You discover that you get what you get, and for me, I went and found stuff. I wanted to know what people were not gonna do. Things that they had greenlit and then said, ‘No, we’re not gonna do [it] 'cause the person dropped out.'"

"So that’s how I got Jumpin’ Jack Flash, ‘cause Shelley Long wasn’t gonna do it. That’s how I got Burglar, ‘cause Bruce Willis wasn’t gonna do it. I got Fatal Beauty because Cher wasn’t going to do it. I got Sister Act because Bette Midler wasn’t going to do it,” she shared.

Notably, Goldberg, who earned an Oscar for the 1990 movie Ghost, became the second Black woman to win Best Supporting Actress, 50 years after Hattie McDaniel won for the 1939 movie Gone with the Wind.

The View star stated that Ghost was also not written for her but “then Patrick Swayze said, ‘I want her’” and she ended up playing Oda Mae Brown in the film.

For the unversed, Goldberg has been in big movies, such as Till, the Emmett Till biopic, which she helped make in 2022, and the TV show Star Trek: The Next Generation.

Other than being on Broadway, she has also been on game shows like The Hollywood Squares and a daytime show, The View.

It is pertinent to mention that in 2023, Whoopi Goldberg made a cameo in the musical version of her 1985 movie The Color Purple, for which she secured an Oscar nomination for best actress in 1986.