Constance Wu is opening up about her 2019 tweets during which she expressed her frustration over the news that her ABC sitcom “Fresh Off the Boat” was renewed for another season. At the time, she tweeted that she was “literally crying” over the renewal because she had to turn down a passion project.
“It’s actually hard for me to talk about without getting emotional. People were basically canceling me for being ungrateful and ungraceful,” the actor shares in Variety‘s exclusive sneak peek of her upcoming appearance on Facebook Watch’s “Red Table Talk,” set to drop this week. “They were saying I didn’t think of the other people’s jobs on the show, how selfish that was and how I was, like, behaving like a diva.”
As she begins to cry, Wu continues: “What people didn’t realize was that during my first couple of years on ‘Fresh Off the Boat,’ I was sexually harassed, and I was intimidated, and I was threatened all the time. This producer, he is an Asian American, but because this show was sort of a beacon of representation for Asian Americans, and I sort of, became a symbol of representation, I didn’t want to sully the one show with sexual harassment claims against the one Asian American man who was doing all this better work for the community.”
This isn’t the first time she’s shared her story. In July, Wu returned to social media after nearly three years to announce her new book, “Making a Scene.” In a lengthy tweet, she expressed that following the backlash over her tweets in 2019, she attempted suicide. “It’s surreal that a few DMs convinced me to end my own life, but that’s what happened,” she wrote at the time. “Luckily, a friend found me and rushed me to the ER.”
In her memoir, which publishes on Oct. 4, Wu opens up about the sexual harassment claims in detail, addressing the producer only by initial. She claims that the man talked her into attending an L.A. Lakers game with him, during which he touched her thigh and grazed her crotch. She writes that he turned cold when she told him to stop.
“I kept my mouth shut for a really long time about a lot of sexual harassment and intimidation that I received the first two seasons of the show. Because, after the first two seasons, once it was a success, once I was no longer scared of losing my job, that’s when I was able to start saying ‘no’ to the harassment, ‘no’ to the intimidation, from this particular producer,” she said at the Atlantic Festival last month.
During the “Red Table Talk” episode, titled “The World Hated Me,” Wu shares more of her on set experiences, as well as her estrangement from her mother and the pain of being ostracized by her community. Watch the exclusive clip below:
If you or anyone you know is having thoughts of suicide, please call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 988 or go to SpeakingOfSuicide.com/resources.
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