Niecy Nash made her film debut in 1995’s Boys on the Side — but it almost didn’t happen at all.
“I didn’t get fired, but I came close,” Nash, 54, shared in Us Weekly’s exclusive clip from the season finale of Peacock’s Hart to Heart with Kevin Hart, which airs on Thursday, July 25. “I come out the bathroom and I’m supposed to say to Whoopi Goldberg, ‘Hey, there’s a sick lady in there. She said her friend was out here and she needs help or something.’ Whoopi starts to laugh, the director goes, ‘Cut, do it again.’”
Nash, who appeared as Woman at Diner in Boys on the Side, went on to explain that she came back out and did the scene again four more times but Goldberg, 68, kept on laughing.
“I go in the bathroom and I pray to the most high and I say, ‘Look here … this woman is going to have to have a glass of act right — ‘cause if she don’t, Imma say something,’” Nash shared.
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Hart, 45, was shocked and replied, “What do you mean? This is Whoopi Goldberg!”
Nash joked that she didn’t care because Goldberg was “ruining [her] chance.”
“I walked back out there, and I commit a cardinal sin: I say the line, she laughs again and I go, ‘Time out. Stop. Hold up. Can we stop?’ I cut the whole thing,” Nash revealed before Hart chimed in and said, “You can’t do that!”
“I know now, Kevin! I cut myself,” she shared.
After Nash called cut on herself, the filmmaker came over to her and asked her what her problem was.
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“I said the line is dumb, and she keep laughing. And [Whoopi] said, ‘No, you didn’t,’ and I said, ‘Yes, I did. They ain’t gonna fire you,’” she recalled. “He said, ‘What’s wrong with it?’ and I said, ‘It’s hokey. People don’t talk like that.’ I don’t even know if this man wrote the script, but I’m telling him the words are dumb.”
After Hart joked that Nash’s incident was “worse than me saying you ain’t gotta take the SATs,” Nash continued on with her story, explaining how the man asked her what line she would like to say instead.
“I said, ‘If it were me, I would be like, ‘Is that your friend in the bathroom? Girl, you better get in there ‘cause she throwing up,’” Nash explained, adding that they changed the line immediately after her suggestion. “And Whoopi Goldberg said, ‘You go girl.’ And that was it.”
Boys on the Side followed a nightclub singer, Jane (Goldberg), and a real estate agent with AIDS, Robin (Mary-Louise Parker), as they traveled across the country from New York City to Los Angeles. The film also stars Drew Barrymore, Matthew McConaughey, Billy Wirth, James Remar, Amy Aquino, Gedde Watanabe, Anita Gillette and Stan Egi.
Tune in to the season finale of Peacock’s Hart to Heart on Thursday, July 25.
