TV’s Mr. Mean, Simon Cowell, showed his emotional side during an interview recently with pal Piers Morgan.
According to reports from the U.K., Cowell sat down with former journalist-turned-television personality Piers, for “Piers Morgan’s Life Stories,” where the “Idol” judge teared up when speaking about the loss of his beloved father, Eric Cowell in 1999.
Britain’s Daily Mail reported Simon got emotional during the interview when a video was played featuring his mother Julie Cowell recounting the phone call where she shared news of the elder Cowell’s death.
He “just went to pieces … He was very shocked, it was unexpected,” his mother says in the clip, according to the paper. “And he really did that time, I never realized how emotional he was until this happened.”
As Cowell addressed what happened himself, he further choked up while talking about what he called a “horrible, horrible, horrible time.”
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“I rang both of them to tell them the news and my mum was acting in kind of a strange way and then she called me back and told me,” Cowell reportedly told Morgan.
Morgan, a former tabloid editor, reportedly then asked Cowell about what his first reaction to the news of his father’s death was.
“Oh Piers, it was um, it wasn’t, wasn’t good,” Cowell said. “But you’ve just got to deal with it, you know, and I went back and realized that your first responsibility is that you’ve got to look after your mum. It was a horrible, horrible, horrible time, like I said. You believe everyone is going to live forever, and they don’t.
“And all the stuff you think you care about, the hit records and stuff like that, it’s just meaningless,” he added.
When Morgan explained Julie Cowell told him she’d never seen her son react so emotionally, the judge said his father’s death was the hardest thing he’s ever dealt with.
“I can’t admit things, that’s why I can’t go to funerals and stuff like that. I find it very, very difficult to deal with that kind of reality. I shut myself off totally because it affects me so badly,” he said. “And then, because I had to deal with that, it was the hardest thing I ever had, because I’ve never lost anyone in my life, you know, it was the first thing like that that ever happened and I just couldn’t accept it.”
The full interview with Simon Cowell airs this Saturday on the U.K.‘s ITV network.