Parker: 'Bill O’Reilly is an idiot'

Mary-Louise Parker has labelled Bill O’Reilly an "idiot" for criticising Jennifer Aniston's comments about single mothers.

Aniston's remarks in an interview that women don't need men to have a family were slammed by O'Reilly as being "destructive to society" earlier this month.

Parker, who plays a single mother on Showtime series Weeds and is also one in real life, went on to suggest that O’Reilly was probably a product of a nuclear family that ignored his needs as a child.

Speaking to Vanity Fair, she said: "Why is being a single mother destructive? Give me a break. He sounds like an idiot. Who is he again? Maybe he’s right, I don’t know. I don’t think you necessarily have to be part of a traditional nuclear family to be a good mother. A lot of children from traditional nuclear families have really unhappy childhoods, and they have dysfunctional, distant parents who don’t pay attention to them.

"Also, some people don’t plan on being single parents. It’s not like you’re sitting at home and thinking, ‘Wow, I’d really like to do this by myself. I’d love to wake up six times a night and change diapers and have nobody to help me. That’d be great!’ I certainly didn’t do that."

She added: "I think that opinion is pretty narrow-minded. People like him - and I don’t even know who he is, so this is just a guess... they usually just say s**t like that for attention. He probably comes from a nuclear family and didn’t get enough attention as a child."