The Infamous 2004 Oprah Interview

Today we reckon with one of the most infamous Mary-Kate and Ashley interviews of all time. On April 28th, 2004, Oprah invited Mary-Kate and Ashley onto The Oprah Winfrey Show to discuss their upcoming film New York Minute, to ask about their plans after graduation, and to address the rumors that had been hounding them in the tabloids.
 
And it's that last point that made this interview infamous. While Mary-Kate and Ashley calmly tried to cool the temperature on the tabloids' relentless speculations over Mary-Kate, Oprah bluntly asks the seventeen year olds their dress size. It's painful and uncomfortable, so much so that the clipped resurfaced on TikTok in 2021 and created such an uproar, that the full video of the interview is nearly impossible to find online anymore.

So for this episode, we piece together the scraps of this interview we could still find and discuss them in depth. We discuss the weird parts of the interview aside from "the moment," the difference between tacos in 2004 and 2024, and the cultural significance of Oprah in the early '00s (with a surprise guest appearance by our good friend, Jessica Charles).

We also touch on Mary-Kate and Ashley's followup interview with Oprah in 2008, and the remarkable rate at which Mary-Kate and Ashley became two wise women in four short years.

Here are the links we discuss:

2004
"Opening": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WQn68nu_BbM&t=22s
How to tell them apart: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0eucwHCNimY
College: https://youtu.be/5wbJfnbyjE4?si=hdnMNp65XUCMaU_q
Allowance: https://youtu.be/bwG_zh2XWKU?si=Pc70FpuDrviR8XXR
Favorite tacos: https://youtu.be/YKgSNRi-Ck8?si=bTDmOdnD4EhSv3Bv
Two different people: https://youtu.be/r4_bX1ttaFg?si=35l0SYHcnZgf9YX0
THE moment: https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZPRTUTbUW/
Another NY Minute interview just for fun: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Koa4jVoX0Nk

2008
Video of MKA interviewing each other: https://www.oprah.com/own-oprahshow/the-olsen-twins-interview-each-other
Oprah article summarizing the interview: https://www.oprah.com/oprahshow/millionaire-moguls/all

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