LOS ANGELES — Actress Constance Wu’s memoir “Making a Scene” dives deep into her past traumas and addresses one of her most controversial moments.
Back in 2019, Wu tweeted about her frustration with the renewal of her hit ABC sitcom “Fresh off the Boat.”
In one tweet, she said: “So upset right now that I’m literally crying,” along with an expletive.
Wu received so much backlash that at one point, she contemplated suicide.
That experience and others are chronicled in her new memoir.
When Wu spoke with “Inside the Issues” host Alex Cohen, Cohen began by asking about a chapter in the book where she wrote about being accused of plagiarism in grade school.
Wu said she wrote a term paper about Beethoven when she was in eighth grade. The actress said the teacher had no proof that she had plagiarized the paper, but insisted that young Wu was “not good enough” to have written it.
“Her version of proof was to discredit my character by taking me to every single one of my other teachers and showing them the opening paragraph and saying, ‘Do you think Constance is good enough to have written this?’ It still makes me cry thinking about it,” she said.
Wu said the only teacher that believed her was her drama teacher, Mr. Frizzle, and that she didn’t realize how that affected her career until she sat down to write her memoir.
“The only teacher who believed in me was my drama teacher and I ended up becoming an actor. Like, it’s so obvious. That’s symbolism right there, but I didn’t even realize it cause I was dwelling on the pain of it so much,” she said.
Wu revealed many painful moments within the essays in her book, including what her infamous tweet in 2019 was really about.
Wu said that a producer on the sitcom had sexually harassed her. The tweet expressing her disappointment about the show’s renewal was about escaping a workplace “that had so many memories of abuse and trauma.”
“At the time I thought I tweeted my disappointment about the show’s renewal. I thought it was just because of the other projects I was going to have to drop out of, but actually writing this [book], I had to revisit a lot of the abuse I suffered the first couple of years that I was working on that show,” Wu said.
Wu’s book was released in October, just over five years after the #MeToo and Time’s Up movements led to a reckoning on harassment in Hollywood.
When asked where she thinks the industry stands now, Wu said more work needs to be done.
“The change that has happened has more to do with optics than it does to do with a real understanding of how corrosive, corrosive sexual harassment is to a woman’s soul,” she said. “I don’t want to sound like a total pessimist, because I think it has a great effect on our young people actually, who hear these stories and understand the consequences and whose brains aren’t yet so fixed.”
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