Key Points
Susan Powter tells EW she was “bored stiff” while filming The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air in 1994.
The Stop the Insanity! fitness icon “never wanted to do TV or movies,” but felt pressured to do so at the height of her fame.
She was even “embarrassed on the Emmys carpet,” Powter recalls to EW.
Filming Will Smith‘s TV sitcom The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air was admittedly a bit of a rotten experience for ’90s fitness legend and Stop the Insanity! infomercial star Susan Powter.
Seated inside one of her favorite restaurants in Las Vegas, the 67-year-old exclusively explains to Entertainment Weekly how the team around her at the height of her fame jerked the wheel of her wellness-oriented career in a different direction than she’d hoped — all in an attempt to turn her into a Hollywood star.
“That’s what started to happen,” Powter reflects between bites of a savory vegan bowl. It’s the small pleasures she enjoys amid her low-key, solitary life, which sees her taking up residence inside a compact apartment while making ends meat from her gig as an Uber Eats delivery driver.
It’s a far cry from the reported $300 million fortune she reflects on losing in her new Stop the Insanity: Finding Susan Powter documentary. In the Jamie Lee Curtis-produced film, Powter recalls losing her earnings over mishandled business partnerships and a lack of awareness about where her own money went following her meteoric rise to superstardom thanks to a string of successful VHS tapes and fitness media in the early ’90s.
Joseph Del Valle/NBCU Photo Bank
Will Smith and Susan Powter on a 1994 episode of ‘The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air’
“One of the managers wanted to do TV, because they wanted the syndication money. I never wanted to do TV or movies. It was just part of the career thing. Let’s get her on this and that,” Powter says of the run-up to her 1994 guest role on Fresh Prince, which came on the season 5, episode 11 installment titled “Will Steps Out.”
“I totally did it and it was fine, I did the best job I could,” she says. “[Smith] was dressed in a fat suit. It was in a grocery store, but I’ve never been that person. I’m not hokey, even though that’s how it was always portrayed.”
She says that, while “Will was super nice” and that she “had a great time” with the future Oscar-winning star (who even “signed something for my kids,” she remembers), she didn’t love what moves like the appearance meant for her overall career.
“I’m not going to be an ass and say doing a TV show is something everybody gets to do. I did my job,” Powter stresses. “Did I ever want to go back on a TV set again? No. Bored stiff. Most boring thing I’ve ever done. Sit in a room all day and wait to come out and read a line, and then you do it 10 times? I literally could bang my head against a wall.”
Powter maintained a high pop culture profile throughout the ’90s, which also resulted in a Kirstie Alley-starring parody of Stop the Insanity! on Saturday Night Live, interviews on The Tonight Show, her own short-lived Susan Powter Show daytime talk series, and even, as she exclusively tells EW, an offer to star in Kevin Costner’s 1995 film Waterworld (which she says she turned down).
Despite personally resisting the notion of becoming a TV star, Powter joined the cast of the 1995 Designing Women spinoff Women of the House, though the show only lasted for one season.
“They were talented women and it was a talented set,” Powter says of the show’s 13-episode run.
Obscured Releasing (2)
‘Stop the Insanity’ star Susan Powter hugs Jamie Lee Curtis in new documentary
“I was good on that. That I have seen. It was really nasty and snotty, that was the character. It was fun,” she remembers, lamenting that “the show died” shortly after she boarded.
Still, while she might’ve enjoyed her guest spots here and there, she “didn’t desperately want to be on a red carpet” and “was embarrassed on the Emmys carpet” later that year. “I didn’t want to be there,” she says.
Powter maintains that she “didn’t get affected by the success of Stop the Insanity!” — but that “a lot of people around it did.”
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The new documentary (now playing in select theaters) follows Powter some 30 years after she decided to step away from the circus surrounding her media career, which also included the star filing for bankruptcy and, as she remembers, firing the entire staff she’d built around her and her Susan Powter Corporation.
In a 2024 interview with EW, Curtis called the film “an indictment of how we discard human beings as they get older in this country,” and said it charted “an exploration of the incredible cruelty that we inflict on older people and the lack of resources, and the lack of dignity offered to these human beings who’ve lived before us and have been in service to us and have given us the lives we all are now living.”
Read the original article on Entertainment Weekly
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