Source: Entertainment Weekly

Amid her pop culture comeback after losing control of a reported $300 million earned by her successful wellness company in the ’90s, Stop the Insanity! infomercial icon Susan Powter has opened up about suicidal ideation as she survived while driving for Uber Eats in Las Vegas.

In a recent interview on comedian Kathy Griffin’s YouTube channel pegged to her new documentary Stop the Insanity: Finding Susan Powter, the 67-year-old wellness staple recalled feeling so low before being contacted to make the documentary that she contemplated ending her own life.

“I have the funniest suicide story in the history of the whole world,” Powter told Griffin, who also previously told Entertainment Weekly in a 2024 interview that she, too, wanted fans to laugh at what she called the absurdity of her own suicide story.

Powter told Griffin that she “died a thousand deaths behind that wheel” while delivering Uber Eats orders to Nevada residents, decades after she had amassed her prior fortune in the 1990s thanks to her wildly successful Stop the Insanity! weight-loss VHS tape, which led to TV deals (she starred in her own talk show) and exercise video releases. “It’s one of the reasons I appreciate driving for Uber Eats, because I’m alone, it’s privacy, I can just die.”

Powter said that, before the proposal came for her to star in the new Jamie Lee Curtis-produced documentary, which follows her throughout her current life living and working in Las Vegas, she reached a point where she wanted to die.

“I said out loud, over and over again, ‘There’s no way out, Sue.’ Honestly. I have three children, and they were raised by me, so I’d never be drama, but if I called my kids and said, ‘I’m done,’ they wouldn’t question me. They were raised by me. And I was done. I was done,” Powter said.

She continued, recalling that she was “sitting in my car, 5:00 in the morning, starting my Uber shift, sobbing,” and that she “was mourning my own death” in the moment.

“You know what I kept saying? ‘How can you kill this body, this energy?’ I was, like I’ve never sobbed in my life, sobbing, and all of a sudden I got mad as hell, and I was like, ‘Damnit, this car doesn’t even produce enough carbon monoxide to kill me. It’s a hybrid! It’s a damn hybrid!'” Powter says as she and Griffin chuckled over the realization. “I was so mad, and then I started laughing, and then I wiped the tears, and two minutes later I was driving through, like, ‘Hi, I’m here for Uber Eats to pick up an order for Aaron.’ Driving right through Burger King.”

In January, Powter opened up to EW about her downfall and bounce back to work, revealing that she didn’t enjoy the direction her team pushed her career in back in the ’90s (she says she declined pressure to accept an offer to star in Kevin Coster’s Waterworld), and recalled a particularly depressing moment she had while deliver Uber Eats years later.

“It was the winter time. Cold and dark. Delivering is hard, and I got a huge order. It was a big order. And I went into a gated community, which I go into all the time, and that’s hard, seeing houses that I used to live in. Like, I used to live there. That affects me, but not that much,” Powter reflected through tears at the time, before revealing that the home she was tasked with delivering to belonged to the late Louie Anderson.

“This got me, because, back in the day, we knew each other. I ring the doorbell of this big order, and Louie Anderson opens the door — and he knew who I was. He looked right at me and he knew. And I knew he knew,” Powter remembered. “He had just had that huge resurrection with that show [Baskets] he did. He did such a good job. He was such a nice man.”

In a separate interview with EW, Curtis explained why the new documentary is an important one for audiences to watch.

“It was an indictment of how we discard human beings as they get older in this country. It’s an exploration of the incredible cruelty that we inflict on older people and the lack of resources, and the lack of dignity offered to these human beings who’ve lived before us and have been in service to us and have given us the lives we all are now living,” the Oscar-winning actress explained. “For me, as much as this is a fun, nostalgic look back to a time that was mindless…. it’s an indictment, exploration, and a challenge for all of us to look at how complicit we are as individuals in that story, and that’s what the movie is about.”

Stop the Insanity: Finding Susan Powter is now playing in select theaters, before landing on digital services beginning Dec. 9. Watch Powter discuss her past suicidal ideations in the interview with Griffin above.

Stream the best of Fiji on VITI+. Anytime. Anywhere.