In the first portion of a three-part televised interview set to air tomorrow, Oprah Winfrey talked about nearly suffering a nervous breakdown earlier this year.
During the conversation, which was filmed last week, Winfrey, 59, told “Access Hollywood” that the stress of balancing work on “Lee Daniels’ The Butler” and her “struggling network” led to the symptoms.
It was when she interviewed Jason Russell — the director of the “Kony 2012” short film who suffered a very public nervous breakdown in March of last year — that she realized she was headed in the wrong direction.
“I was sitting and listening to Jason Russell describe his symptoms… Saying, ‘Um, this sounds pretty familiar to me,’” Winfrey said.
The the television legend realized she was taking on more work than she could handle.
“In the beginning, it was just sort of speeding and a kind of numbness and going from one thing to the next thing to the next thing,” she said. “I will tell you when I realized that I thought, ‘All right, if I don’t calm down I’m gonna be in serious trouble.’ I was in the middle of doing voiceovers, you know? And I remember closing my eyes in between each page because looking at the page and the words at the same time was too much stimulation for my brain.”
Winfrey stressed, that while she realized she was in trouble, she never actually experienced a breakdown.
“I mean, I wasn’t ready to go run naked in the streets. Let’s make that very clear,” she said. “But I had reached a point where I just couldn’t take in anymore stimulation. Ok? That’s what I meant by that.”
Winfrey’s stress wasn’t the only issue touched on in the interview. She also talked about an upcoming reality series with Lindsay Lohan, her relationship with Stedman Graham and the eventually-deleted sex scene she shot with Terrence Howard for “The Butler.”
“Well it was not sex. And the reason it was not sex [was] because I would not let Lee take me there. It was completely out of character, and I thought that Lee was pushing the Oprah envelope,” Winfrey said.