The producers behind the new Wendy Williams documentary said they wouldn’t have begun filming it if they knew about her mental health diagnosis ahead of time.
In a new interview with The Hollywood Reporter, Where Is Wendy Williams? producers Mark Ford and Brie Miranda Bryant discussed the news last week that Williams had been diagnosed with new primary progressive aphasia and frontotemporal dementia.
“Of course, if we had known that Wendy had dementia going into it, no one would’ve rolled a camera,” Ford said Monday in the interview, in which they share that they are currently unaware of Williams’ whereabouts and that they have not talked to her since last April when they did the last interview for the film.
“The diagnosis that was announced was not the information that any of us had going into it,” Bryant said. “So, people were watching the journey with information that we didn’t have in those first two hours, and I think that’s part of the confusion and the upset and outrage.”
The pair responded to some criticism that the documentary could be interpreted as “exploitative,” saying they tried to remain “as transparent as possible” with it. In the doc, Williams’ son Kevin Hunter Jr. reveals that Williams’ dementia diagnosis had also been given in 2021 and says that the doctors told him that it is alcohol-induced.
“We wanted people to understand the journey of the filmmakers and how upsetting it was for all of us in certain instances and also how outrageous in some ways the situations were,” said Ford. “Like, Wendy would be left alone without food, completely on her own in that apartment with stairs that she could easily fall down. There was no one there 24/7. So, these are just all the questions we had throughout.”
Ford also shared that he was “not familiar” with any of the folks attached the press releases shared about Williams’ diagnosis, aside from Williams’ guardian, who sued Lifetime, asking that it be pulled off air.
“Did it surprise us? I don’t think it surprised us,” Ford said. “Of course, we’re not medical professionals. But anyone watching the film can see that there are signs that were there and then progressed rapidly.”
“And also, dementia is an insidious disease, right? It’s tricky. You’re not really sure what’s going on. So, you’re able to see this journey of discovery across these four hours and I do hope people stick with it to the end, because then you’ll see what the intention ultimately became, which was that Wendy’s suffering and the family’s suffering is not in vain,” he later added. “That there’s a message here that is universal, and people need to hear, and, again, that echoes the experience of thousands of other families under this guardianship system. And documentary filmmaking is always a tricky thing.”
A Rolling Stone review describes the two-part documentary as a “devastating watch” and a “tough pill to swallow.”
