During an appearance on Andy Cohen's SiriusXM show, the multihyphenate clarified his earlier comments about the series: "It was challen
Lee Daniels visits SiriusXM at the SiriusXM Studios on in Los Angeles on Aug. 28, 2024. Frazer Harrison/Getty Images
Maybe Empire wasn’t so bad after all?
A few weeks after Lee Daniels slammed his time on the hit Fox series — “Horrible. Absolutely the worst experience. Horrible!” he told The Film Stage — the show’s co-creator has walked back those comments by claiming “that’s not true” when asked if he ever said it in the first place.
During an appearance on SiriusXM’s Andy Cohen Live to promote his Netflix film The Deliverance, Daniels was asked about his sharp-tongued comments, which made headlines in early September. “I read that you called Empire the worst experience. Is that true?” host Andy Cohen asked.
“That’s so not true,” Daniels replied in curious turn of events considering the article is published as a Q&A format with no corrections or clarifications. “What I meant was the worst experience because all of my films have been independently financed, it was the first time that I was taking notes from anybody. You have to understand, no one gave me notes to do anything.”
Cohen then asked Daniels if the network gave him a lot of notes on the series. “Yes, and it’s normal, you know, it’s normal for the studio to sort of do that, but it was like, ‘What?’ It was jarring for me,” he continued.
Daniels had originally told The Film Stage that he “only did Empire just so I could see what that experience was like” of receiving notes on a project. “There’s so many filmmakers and writers that I respect that have to answer to people,” he told the publication about why he wanted to receive notes. And after calling it “the worst experience,” he added, “But guess what? Fucking that money, money, money! I was able to put my kids through college and shit. So that in itself was worth it.”
Daniels then claimed to Cohen that when Empire was around, “there weren’t any Black writers in any rooms.” Empire, starring Taraji P. Henson, Terrence Howard and Jussie Smollett, ran from 2015-20. “There weren’t any Black directors on television. There wasn’t Black Panther, there wasn’t Insecure, there wasn’t any of that. You know, and so we were learning as we were growing, and there were all these rules, and Black people were not able to be employed creatively because the system was not for us, so it was a bit of a struggle.”
Insecure debuted in 2016, while the Black Panther franchise launched in 2018.
Daniels had more to say. “But I think that I had a great experience with [Fox], and they really, they understood that things had to change, and then also, you know, you can’t, it was the first time somebody’s like, ‘You can’t tell me how to be Black. Stop with the insanity. Stop, stop, stop, stop, stop,’ and so it was a first for all of us and it was challenging for me, and it was a nightmare in the beginning, but then it was great.”
ging for me, and it was a nightmare in the beginning, but then it was great."
