A truly great artist excels at all endeavors because they charge towards the work with full-force conviction. That is precisely what Patti LuPone does when it comes to shading Madonna.
The Broadway legend appeared on a special edition of Hot Ones Versus this week alongside her Agatha All Along co-star Aubrey Plaza, because press tours in 2024 eschew the needless frivolity of interviews with journalists for the crucial public service of eating chicken wings. (Adhering to a mandate that every Patti LuPone-related anecdote be delightfully quirky, LuPone and Plaza were roommates in addition to co-stars, with LuPone insisting on taking Plaza in and caring for her while the latter made her off-Broadway debut in last year’s Danny and the Deep Blue Sea.)
Hot Ones Versus is a competition-style spin on the popular interview/celebrity torture series, where actors are dared to tell a salacious truth, or otherwise take a bite of a painfully hot chicken wing. The person who eats the most wings—aka told the fewest truths—loses.
Plaza dug into the well of LuPone’s past comments about Madonna for her question.
In a 2017 episode of Bravo’s Watch What Happens Live!, a caller asked LuPone, who originated the role of Eva Peron in Evita on Broadway, if she ever had a conversation with Madonna about taking on the part for the 1996 movie.
“The only thing that Madonna ever said to me was, ‘I’m taller than you,’” LuPone said, recalling meeting the pop star for the first time at the movie premiere’s after party. Host Andy Cohen followed up by asking LuPone what she thought of Madonna’s performance in the movie, to which LuPone iconically replied that she saw a music video for the “Buenos Aires” number on TV: “I thought it was a piece of s---.”
After the audience gasped and giggled in shock at a celebrity giving an actual, honest answer to a question—a practice that’s practically gone extinct—LuPone continued. “Madonna is a movie killer,” she said. “She’s dead behind the eyes. She can’t act her way out of paper bag. She should not be in film or on stage.”
In the Hot Ones Versus clip, Plaza references the notorious interview and challenges the three-time Tony-winner: Look into the camera and apologize to Madonna, or eat a “death wing.” LuPone gives a classically diva shimmy to settle into her chair, stares directly into the camera, grabs a chicken wing, and chows down, completely unbothered. As punctuation, she flings the chicken bone at the lens.
“I f---ing knew it,” Plaza cheers.
A national treasure for a reason, LuPone knows both how delicious it is to be candid—and how satisfying it is to lean into a joke, even if that joke is about a so-called feud. And, as we all should know, no one feuds better than LuPone. When she received a $1 million settlement after suing Andrew Lloyd Weber for breach of contract after he recast in Sunset Boulevard, she used the money to build what she went on to name “The Andrew Lloyd Weber Memorial Pool” at her country home.
