Audra McDonald Clueless Over Patti LuPone Calling Her ‘Not a Friend’ Due to Falling Out: ‘I Haven’t Seen Her in 11 Years… I Don’t Know What Rift She’s Talking About’

Audra McDonald is responding to Petti LuPone's recent assertion that the pair are not friends.

via: Variety

Audra McDonald is responding with surprise to Patti LuPone‘s recent interview with The New Yorker, in which LuPone shaded McDonald and revealed the two had an apparent falling out and are no longer friends.

“I mean, if there’s a rift between us, I don’t know what it is,” McDonald told Gayle King on “CBS Mornings” when asked if she was “surprised” by LuPone’s comment. “That’s something you’d have to ask Patti about.”

“I haven’t seen her in about 11 years because I’ve been busy with life and stuff,” McDonald added. “So, I don’t know what rift she’s talking about. You’d have to ask her.”

In the original interview, LuPone said “she’s not a friend” when McDonald’s name was brought up by interviewer Michael Schulman. McDonald is a Tony nominee this year for playing Rose in “Gypsy,” a role that previously won LuPone a Tony.

The two actors’ alleged feud was brought up as LuPone was reflecting on an incident that occurred last fall when she was on Broadway in “The Roommate.” LuPone filed a complaint as noise from the musical next door, “Hell’s Kitchen,” could be heard in her theater. “Hell’s Kitchen” Tony winner Kecia Lewis posted a video slamming LuPone’s behavior as “bullying” and “racially microaggressive.” Lewis added that LuPone was “rooted in privilege” and called out LuPone for labeling “a Black show loud.” McDonald liked Lewis’ video.

“Exactly,” LuPone told The New Yorker. “And I thought, ‘You should know better.’ That’s typical of Audra. She’s not a friend.”

When Schulman then asked LuPone for her thoughts on McDonald’s production of “Gypsy,” LuPone stared back at him “in silence for fifteen seconds” and proceeded to look out the window and say: “What a beautiful day.”

LuPone and McDonald worked together in 2007 on the Los Angeles Opera’s production of “Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny” and in 2000 for the New York Philharmonic’s concert version of “Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street.”

Watch McDonald’s interview on “CBS Mornings” in the video below.