Lee Daniels is not holding anything back.
The Precious director recently got candid about his time as the creator, writer and producer of FOX’s Empire, saying that he had a “horrible” time on the show and only did it because he was curious about answering “to suits.”
“I wanted to know what that experience was like,” he told Film Stage in an interview published Sept. 4, noting that all of his productions up to that point had been independent. “All of my friends, they get notes and s–t. And I’m like, ‘What is that like?!'”
As Daniels noted, while he “only did Empire just so I could see what that experience was like,” he is hoping to never work under circumstances like that again.
“Absolutely the worst experience,” he said of his time on the show. “Horrible!”
However, there was one positive that came from Empire, which ran on FOX from 2015 to 2020: “Money, money, money.”