Kelly Clarkson was the first-ever American Idol winner, and she has gone on to have one of the most successful careers of any Idol alum. Sixteen years after she was crowned in 2002, she reflects on her big win.
In a candid interview with Entertainment Weekly, Clarkson admits that she didn’t actually want to win the reality singing competition.
“I do remember [runner-up] Justin [Guarini] and I having a conversation before and I was like, ‘I don’t want to win, I don’t want to win,’ because we found out we had to do a movie,” she recalls. “We just found that out Top 2 and he really wanted to do a movie and I really didn’t want to do it. I was like, ‘It’d be really super cool if I got second and you got first because the winner has to do the movie and the second one doesn’t.’ I won, so I had to do the movie.”
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It isn’t that Clarkson isn’t a fan of movies, per se — she just would just rather watch them than star in them. During an interview with the Howard Stern Show last year, Clarkson confessed that she tried everything she could to get out of doing From Justin to Kelly.
“I cried so hard because I did not want to do that movie,” she said. “One, it wasn’t a good movie and two, I never wanted to be an actress. I literally was in Texas, in my apartment, crying in my closet talking to him [Simon Fuller] trying to hide from my family because I felt weak.”
She told Stern that she was so embarrassed of the film that she showed up to the premiere drunk: “I literally ended up in a fountain soaked. I was real hammered.”
Clarkson now serves as a coach on The Voice (and there are thankfully no feature films in her distant future). American Idol returns to TV on March 11 at 8PM ET on ABC.
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