Tatum O'Neal shares new info about filming Paper Moon with father Ryan O'Neal

Tatum O’Neal has recently made headlines for sharing her harrowing experience with a severe stroke in the spring of 2020—one that left her in a six-week coma and a struggle to remember how to speak. Now, while she is still in recovery for both aphasia and addiction, the 59-year-old actor is taking the time to reflect on her life and career—two things that both intertwine with her father, Ryan O’Neal, a man with whom she has shared a publicly contentious relationship for decades.

This isn’t the first time Tatum has been in the news. In 1974, a then 10-year-old Tatum became the youngest Oscar winner of all time (a record that is still yet to be broken) for Paper Moon, a film she starred in with Ryan. Since then, their relationship has been a well-documented disaster, studded with drugs, bitterness, and some unbelievably inappropriate behavior from Ryan. (In a 2001 memoir, for example, she claims that she “remained Ryan’s companion on the Hollywood party circuit, growing inured to sex and drugs before I was in my teens.”)

In a new interview with The Hollywood Reporter, Tatum opened up about the current state of her and Ryan’s relationship, after sharing a rare Instagram photo of the two of them with the caption “Happy birthday dad I love you.”

“He loved me, but then hated me, because I won the Academy Award,” she said of their time working together on Paper Moon. According to THR, Ryan at least congratulated his 10-year-old daughter on her win (via a written note), while her mother never acknowledged it at all. “Weird shit happened. It kind of went in the wrong direction to happiness,” she continued.

Ryan O’Neal did not respond to THR’s request for comment, but the publication did pull a telling quote from 2011's Ryan and Tatum: The O’Neals, an OWN reality series following the father and daughter’s attempts at reconciliation. “I had this peculiar thing on Paper Moon, and that is the director insisted she wasn’t my daughter,” he said. “The director insisted that my character, Moses, never thought for a second that this was his daughter… And maybe it never wore off.”

Tatum also recalls her father’s ire while filming an iconic scene from the film where she and her father’s character argue about Bibles. The scene required multiple takes, as director Peter Bogdanovich wanted it to be all one shot. “My father was like, ‘You were supposed to say this.’ And I was like, ‘Oops. Sorry.’ And then we had to drive all the way back,” she said. “I remember my dad getting really mad at me. Not really mad, but sort of mad. But I love that scene, the Bible scene. I do.”

Now, all these years and at least one medical trauma later, Tatum is yet again attempting to reconcile with Ryan. In the interview, she spoke about their most recent meeting in September 2020, during which the photo for her birthday post was captured. While the two didn’t talk about a lot, according to the actor, “there was happiness.” She continued:

“I saw he was having coffee, and I said, ‘I want some coffee.’ He was asking me things about me, and I said, ‘I have a bad back. But I’m trying so hard. I’m alive.’ But then when I tried to text him two days ago to see if I could go back, he didn’t call me back. So then it gets a little weird, unfortunately.”