It's been two months since the makers of La La Land had to sheepishly shuffle aside so Team Moonlight could accept the Best Picture Oscar that was rightfully theirs, and Faye Dunaway is only now addressing her role in the awkward ordeal.
The acclaimed actress is breaking her silence in a new interview with Lester Holt for NBC Nightly News. Dunaway told Holt that she was perplexed by her fellow presenter and Bonnie and Clyde costar Warren Beatty's reaction when he first opened the envelope.
"We took the card out, and he didn’t say anything,” the Oscar-winning actress recalled. “He paused, he looked over me, off stage… and I finally said, ‘You’re impossible!'”
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Dunaway took Beatty's reaction as a joke, not realizing that he was legitimately confused by the card inside, which read "Emma Stone, La La Land" rather than a movie title.
“I thought he was joking,” she added. “I thought he was stalling. Warren’s like that, he kind of holds the power… but it’s part of his charm. I read the name of the film on the card.”
The La La Land crew celebrated and joined the presenters on stage. Suddenly showrunners and the accountants from PricewaterhouseCoopers, who had accidentally handed off the wrong envelope, rushed over to inform everyone that Moonlight, not La La Land, had actually won.
Though Beatty was quick to speak out about the incident, his co-presenter has until now avoided offering her own version of events. After the Oscars, host Jimmy Kimmel joked that Dunaway "made quite a getaway" after the show.
"She read the wrong name and split," Kimmel told his viewers. "She got the hell out of there. She was smart, too. I spent the whole rest of the night answering questions about it."
Dunaway is no longer shying away from the subject.
“We were, I won’t say deers in the headlight, but you are completely stunned, you don’t know what has happened,” the Mommie Dearest and Network star admitted of the experience.
She added that she felt "very guilty."
“I thought I could have done something, surely," she explained. "Why didn’t I see Emma Stone’s name on top of the card?”
Watch a preview from her interview below.