Bette Midler is airing out her decades-old grievance with Lindsay Lohan, revealing the reason she regrets not suing the Freaky Friday actress after briefly appearing in a TV show together over 20 years ago.
Midler appeared on David Duchovny's Fail Better podcast where she opened up about her time on the shortly-lived 2000 sitcom Bette, which starred the Tony Award winner and the Parent Trap star, who played her daughter for only one episode, per TMZ. Lohan was in the pilot of the show, which lasted for one season and that Midler called a "big, big, big mistake," before deciding to leave, a move Midler now regrets not suing her for.
"Lindsay Lohan was cast as my daughter in the pilot. Well, after the pilot, Lindsay Lohan decided she didn't want to do it. Or she had other fish to fry. So, Lindsay Lohan left the building. And I said, well, now what do you do?'" she recalled.
However, most of Midler's complaints seem more focused on the behind-the-scenes action and being too "green" while dealing with the studio. Though she served as one of the show's producers at the time, the Hocus Pocus star said she didn't realize that she could have asserted her stance and sued the then-teenaged star for wanting out, Deadline reports.
"The studio didn't help me. It was extremely chaotic... and if I had been in my right mind, or if I had known that my part of my duties were to stand up and say, 'This absolutely will not do, I'm going to sue,' then I would have done that. But I seem to have been cosseted in some way that I couldn't get to the writer's room. I couldn't speak to the showrunner. I couldn't make myself clear."
As for the show itself, time has allowed Midler to realize what a mistake it was going into her brief tenure as a sitcom star without knowing more about the genre.
"I did a television show, Bette. Does it get any more generic than that? A big, big, big mistake," she said. "I think for several reasons. It was the wrong motivation. It was a part of the media I simply did not understand. I watched it. I appreciated it. I enjoyed it, but I didn't know what it meant to make it."
She continued, "I had made theatrical live events. I had made films. I had made variety television shows. I had been on talk shows. But I had never done a situational comedy. I didn't realize what the pace was. And I didn't understand what the hierarchy was. And no one bothered to tell me."