It’s over thirty years ago that we shot the film. It was the most incredible experience of my life. It changed my life forever. For better or for worse, for anything Jerry did on the set, who fucking cares? The characters worked, they just meshed and intermingled so perfectly, everything came together in the universe. I got the role out of five hundred actresses—it was like a tour de force. What the fuck do I care if Jerry Lewis, at eighty-seven, is being who Jerry Lewis is? He doesn’t stop me from being funny. He doesn’t stop me from being insane and having fun and loving my life. If that’s the world he grew up in, and Jerry Lewis can’t handle women being funny, is anybody really surprised by this? His life has been very, very, very tumultuous. He’s not a happy person. His own children, I don’t think, really like him.

 

So, like I said, who wants to argue with Jerry Lewis? He’s an icon. He’s, in his own very old school way, one of the most brilliant performers of his generation whether you like him or hate him or find him just to be a total fool. He’s still somebody that when I sat across that table from him, and I was able to deliver that monologue, he was there, he was present, whether he hated me, whether he was being an actor or being himself, it doesn’t matter. It worked. It stands for all time on celluloid, and I’m never gonna shit on that. And I don’t need to say anything derogatory about Jerry Lewis, nor do I need to defend the fact that I am a woman and I have arrived and I got to arrive because of all the hard work and laboring that my sisters and many of my brothers did laying the pavement out in the hot sun, so I got to ride those highways, I get to ride them, and hopefully, I’ve paved them a little bit further for the people who are coming behind me. So all’s well. I’m happy to be where I am.

 

MS: And let it be said that you beat out Meryl, Debra Winger, and Ellen Barkin, among others, for that role.

 

SB: It doesn’t even matter who I beat out—the bottom line is that it was the right role for me at the right time, and everybody knows it was the right role. Nobody can say, ‘Oh God, I wish I could’ve seen somebody else in that role,’ because if that’s the only big and important role I ever do in a film, that was the role that was meant for me, and I’m blessed. At the very least, I’m able to get on that stage and do my thing, and not very many people get to do that.