Susan Powter, a queen of the ’90s wellness surge thanks to her overwhelmingly popular Stop the Insanity! infomercial, now lives a quieter, peacefully secluded life delivering Uber Eats near her quaint home in Las Vegas. But, as the 67-year-old exclusively tells Entertainment Weekly, ghosts of her past in the pop culture spotlight sometimes pop up in unexpected places — like, she reveals, an instance where she delivered food to the late Louie Anderson shortly before his death in 2022.

“I’ll tell you a story,” Powter tells EW as tears well in her eyes in the corner of a small Hawaiian cuisine restaurant on the periphery of the the Nevada city. “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 wipes away tears amid a lunchtime discussion that also touches on her retreat from the spotlight toward the end of the decade that launched her to superstardom, after she walked away from her short-lived Susan Powter Show talk series, turned down mainstream movie roles (like, as she exclusively reveals to EW, a part in Kevin Costner’s Waterworld), and lost a multi-million-dollar fortune over what she suggests was a shady management and legal team that sustained themselves on her fame.

She admits that this particular instance with Anderson, though, impacted her more than she anticipated.

“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 remembers. “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.”

Powter goes on to speculate that “food was the trial” for the Coming to America actor, and suggests that “he lost a hundred pounds 10 times over” — an assumption that she says made her feel bad for delivering the food to him: “I could feel the shame and the shame, the shame and the shame.” She says that, despite his recognition, she “just looked down and gave him his food,” and the two didn’t exchange words.

She adds that she “was in tears for three days” over the meeting, and that she was thankful that he didn’t mention anything about her identity. “I was so grateful to him for being so honorable. He knew who I was, and you could feel it,” she says, getting emotional once again when she recalls that he died roughly three months after the exchange.

Anderson died in Las Vegas in January 2022 at age 68, as a result of complications from large B-cell lymphoma.

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Amid other projects Powter has cooking (including a podcast and a planned nationwide tour in an RV she’s yet to purchase, on top of a recently published memoir, And Then Em Died…), she’ll also feature in an upcoming documentary film directed by filmmaker Zeberiah Newman and produced by Oscar-winning actress Jamie Lee Curtis.

“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,” Curtis previously told EW of the film, which doesn’t have a release date. “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.”

Check back with EW for more from our interview with Powter.