Audra McDonald doesn’t clap back, she simply points in another direction. After Patti LuPone told The New Yorker McDonald is “not a friend,” McDonald kept it classy in an interview with CBS Sunday Morning previewed May 29. “I mean, I don’t — if there’s a rift between us, I don’t know what it is,” she says to Gayle King. “That’s something you’ll have to ask Patti about. I haven’t seen her in about 11 years just because we’ve been busy just with life and stuff. So I don’t know what rift she’s talking about, but you’d have to ask her.”
The animosity initially appeared to center around McDonald leaving a supportive Instagram comment on a post by Hell’s Kitchen actress Kecia Lewis, who accused LuPone of making “racist microaggressions” by calling the sound bleed from HK “too loud.” But the question is now, obviously, what happened 11 years ago? In 2014, McDonald won her sixth Tony Award, for Best Actress in a Play for Lady Day at Emerson’s Bar and Grill, making her the first person to win all four performance Tonys. LuPone, meanwhile, starred as a religious fundamentalist on American Horror Story and herself on Girls. One thing they both were doing, however, was the ice-bucket challenge.
The sole piece of public interaction between the two actresses that year seems to be when Audra McDonald tagged Patti LuPone in the ALS ice-bucket challenge. LuPone responded from a lounge chair on the beach. “Why, it’s a note from Audra McDonald,” LuPone says in her video, complete with tech crew and props. “‘I have challenged you to take the ice bucket dunk.’” Then she gets doused in water and tags Alec Baldwin, Jessica Lange, and Alex Borstein. Not quite unfriendly, but things have been on ice ever since, at least according to McDonald. Patti, the stage is yours …
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What happened in 2014? The ice-bucket challenge, that’s what.
