Oprah Winfrey covers the latest issue of Hollywood Reporter to promote her role in The Butler. I’m wayyy behind on my Oscar viewing this season, but if the SAG nominations are any indication (and they usually are), then Oprah will likely get an Oscar nod this year. Will she win? Who knows. She’ll probably be up against Jennifer Lawrence, who is an academy darling if there ever was one. Plus Julia Roberts, who can’t be counted out as a mere nominee by any stretch.

The photoshoot here is standard, and I’m so used to seeing Oprah photoshopped on the cover of her own magazine that I don’t even know what she really looks like. This interview is pretty good though. Oprah says there will never be another Oprah, which is absolutely true (sorry, Dina Lohan). The more interesting part is how Oprah explains why she never had kids. It sucks that childless female celebrities always get asked these sorts of questions, but the O handles her response well:

Ending “The Oprah Winfrey Show”: “The only thing I ever questioned about leaving [the show] was the timing. Should I have waited and then started OWN separately? Should I have tried to start it earlier? But the actual ending of the show, I never wanted to be in the position of ever having people say, ‘You shoulda come out of the rain.'”

She’s generous: “When you’re the most successful person in your family, in your neighborhood and in your town, everybody thinks you’re the First National Bank and you have to figure out for yourself where those boundaries are. I got to the point where nobody ever asked me for anything less than $5,000. I felt pressured for a long time to say yes, because I thought, ‘I can’t lie and say I don’t have it. My salary is printed in the paper. I’ve bought more houses and cars than I can even tell you.”

She wants to do Broadway: “It’s something I would like to do, but I’d like to get settled in my house, have a life and then make the next move. I’d just like to be in the space where I really feel like I have nothing to prove. I think I’m just about there.”

On her successor: “There won’t be a ‘next Oprah.’ Just like there won’t be another Barbara Walters, Aretha Franklin or Whitney Houston. People who make their mark in the way that they made it, that’s it.”

Why she isn’t a mother: “If I had kids, my kids would hate me. They would have ended up on the equivalent of the Oprah show talking about me; because something [in my life] would have had to suffer and it would’ve probably been them.”

Her BFF Gayle King always wanted kids: “Gayle [now a mother of two] was the kind of kid who, in seventh grade home ec class, was writing down her name and the names of her children. While she was having those kind of daydreams, I was having daydreams about how I could be Martin Luther King.”

[From Hollywood Reporter]

That last part about Gayle could be considered some slight shade, right? I don’t think Oprah meant it that way at all. They’re the best of friends and appreciate each other’s differences. I totally get what Oprah is saying about how she simply didn’t have room in her life to be a mother. I feel that way sometimes too, and I am a mother. Kids take up so much damn time (and some days are tougher than others). I’d never (EVER) wish my daughter away, but she is a little vacuum of resources.

Photos courtesy of Hollywood Reporter