As ’90s wellness icon Susan Powter once asked her audience while standing in front of a wall of bottled liquid in her vintage VHS tape Shopping With Susan: “How much water could there possibly be?” Well, the 67-year-old exclusively tells Entertainment Weekly she would’ve found out if she’d taken up Kevin Costner‘s offer to join the cast of his infamous 1995 post-apocalyptic aquatic action film Waterworld.

In a new life- and career-spanning interview, Powter, whose 1993 weight-loss infomercial Stop the Insanity! became a crossover pop culture phenomenon that led to a reported $300 million fortune, tells EW that mainstream popularity led to a variety of off-kilter offers. Some she indulged, like her own Susan Powter Show talk series and TV guest spots on Will Smith’s The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air and Designing Women spin-off Women of the House. Other opportunities, she reveals, she turned down after feeling her management team push her career away from her core message of health and wellness, and into hollow celebrity territory.

“I was in a hair salon, my manager was on a conference call on the other end,” Powter reminisces from inside a small Hawaiian restaurant in Las Vegas, where she now lives in an apartment and works as an Uber Eats driver, after she says the same team she built around her led her down a path she wasn’t comfortable with — and ultimately lost her fortune while traversing. Powter says that Costner called her during a beauty appointment in Beverly Hills and they had a “lovely conversation” about her potentially joining the cast of his upcoming film Waterworld.

“He was about to shoot that movie. The character he was talking about was like a crazy warrior,” Powter remembers, though she can’t recall the name of the part she says the Oscar winner wanted her to play. “It was an intelligent conversation. I said I really appreciate you thinking of me. It’s a movie, I’m not going to be a jerk. S—! A movie! We were talking about doing it, we were talking about the role. I said, ‘[The character is] just not who I am.’ I’m passionate; I’m not angry. There’s a difference.”

Powter says that’s when “things started to change” between herself and those who worked with her. “My manager was livid because she wanted the movie. She wanted me to do a movie,” she says. “[She thought] it would’ve been a great thing for me.”

She adds that, looking back, she didn’t care about the film’s reportedly exhaustive shooting schedule and its lack of commercial success. “What I know is I had a nice conversation with a very nice man, and he understood,” Powter says. “I was not in any way affected by it.”

Still, she says that she “didn’t want to represent women that way,” based on what she remembers about the character Costner pitched to her. “I’m not angry. The opening line of Stop the Insanity! is I am not angry; I’m passionate. That’s a very deliberate line.”

EW has reached out to a representative for Costner for comment.

Though Waterworld ultimately underperformed at the box office upon grossing $264 million globally on a massive $175 million budget, the film still earned an Oscar nomination for Best Sound, and even spawned a popular theme park show based on the film’s plot. After opening its initial iteration at Universal Studios Hollywood in 1995, an additional three versions of the live show opened at Universal parks in Japan, China, and Singapore — with all four still in operation today.

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Between other projects Powter has brewing (including a podcast and a nationwide tour in an RV, on top of promoting her new memoir, And Then Em Died…), she also serves as the subject of a feature-length documentary she shot with director Zeberiah Newman, which was produced by Academy Award-winning star Jamie Lee Curtis.

“She found this power,” Newman previously told EW of Powter’s success story and subsequent mainstream decline, after losing a significant amount of weight as a 260-pound single mother raising two sons and telling her story to millions of American women who helped build her empire in the early ’90s. “Now in her 60s, living in this life of poverty and surviving it and getting out of it, she has a very similar story to bring to the masses and to women because she’s lived it.”

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