Sandra Bernhard is reflecting on what could have been, had she remained in touch with Madonna.
On Tuesday, July 30, the Roseanne alum, 69, opened up about her friendship with the iconic singer and how she still thinks about their falling out during an appearance on Jesse Tyler Ferguson’s Dinner’s On Me podcast, People reports.
When Ferguson brought up Bernhard’s “loyal” and “sensitive” nature, he said that their “separation of friendship” must have been “a little bit harder” on her than Madonna, but asked if the duo would be “fine” if they were to reunite.
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“It would be fine, but I mean, I don’t know what it would be,” Bernhard explained. “And I hate getting nostalgic and caught up in that time because it was such like, the perfect time. The late ’80s when I was doing my one-woman show here in New York, and I was friends with her and doing Letterman all the time. I mean, everything was … so fresh.”
“So there are times when I’m like, that really makes me sad, you know, that we couldn’t maintain our friendship. I mean, I could have,” she added.
Sandra Bernhard and Madonna’s friendship made headlines in the late ’80s. They famously appeared side-by-side and wore identical outfits during an appearance on Late Night with David Letterman in 1988. Eventually, the duo were seen less and less, and the two quietly fell out of friendship.
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While appearing on Jess Rothschild’s Hot Takes & Deep Dives podcast in December 2021, Bernhard revealed that the two grew apart because their headline-grabbing friendship became too much to maintain.
“Certainly, for me, I learned that I didn’t really like that level of visibility and, you know, having to work it constantly,” she confessed. “We all, as performers, work it to a certain degree, but I’m a very improvisational person, onstage and in my life, and I don’t like being tied down in having to be a certain way for my image. … Therefore, I continued to evolve as a person and a personality.”
“I think, what I tried to impart in our friendship is, ‘I’m really your friend, I’m not just somebody that’s passing through.’ And I guess for a while we had a real friendship, but it’s hard for somebody like [Madonna],” Bernhard recalled. “She doesn’t really want somebody around who reflects too much of who she is. Therefore, her relationships just don’t last.”