Kelly Clarkson was the first-ever American Idol winner on Sept. 4, 2002, and she has gone on to have one of the most successful careers of any Idol alum.
In 2018, sixteen years after she was crowned, she reflected on her big win in a candid interview with Entertainment Weekly.
Clarkson admitted that she didn’t actually want to win the reality singing competition.
Why Didn’t Kelly Clarkson Want to Win American Idol?
“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 recalled a few years back.
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“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.”
Why Doesn’t Kelly Clarkson Do Any Acting?
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, Clarkson further confessed that she tried everything she could to get out of doing 2003’s 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 by the film that she showed up to the premiere drunk: “I literally ended up in a fountain soaked. I was real hammered.”
Clarkson later had her own talk show, the Kelly Clarkson Show, but thankfully, that didn’t require any acting. Don’t expect more movies in her future.
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