Constance Wu for the NY Times
The NYT print headline is prob more accurate to the content than the online version’s headline. Oh & it’s not really a memoir, but a book of several standalone essays. Thank u @Thessaly for writing w/ honesty, integrity & compassion https://t.co/2HyQWxYbse pic.twitter.com/BxGHp4XnLp
- Constance Wu (@ConstanceWu) September 25, 2022
Constance Wu sat down with the NY Times to discuss her new book Making a Scene, a collection of essays about her life.
• She attempted suicide after her Twitter drama in 2019. Accused of being ungrateful for being upset her show had been renewed after getting further success in movies, Constance was abandoned by colleagues and close friends. She survived when a friend found her and she was put in a psychiatric hospital. She personally apologized face to face to colleagues when production resumed.
• She reveals in the book she wanted to get away from a show producer who had been sexually harassing her.
• In person, Constance is described as empathetic and curious. She is quick to laugh but also quick to swear. Her face is expressive and her emotions tend to float close to the surface. She is the first to admit how easily she cries. She also acknowledges she can be reckless and impulsive, but those might be the very same traits that lend themselves so well to acting.
• For almost five years, she was estranged from her mother due to resentment, anxiety and paranoia from public scrutiny.
• She describes herself as an emotional and extroverted child who liked writing, but after being falsely accused of plagiarizing an essay about Beethoven by her 8th grade teacher, she turned her attentions toward local theater.
• In another essay, she describes a date that ended in the kind of non-consensual sex that she would later understand to be rape:
In a powerful excerpt from her memoir, Constance Wu recalls the sexual assault she endured in her 20s-and wonders why it took her so long to recognize it for what it was. https://t.co/Jnbf4BDoeV
- VANITY FAIR (@VanityFair) September 26, 2022
• She initially did not want to write about her negative experiences on Fresh Off the Boat, despite her editor's encouragement: “I didn’t want to sully such a great beacon of hope for Asian Americans in the television landscape. I didn’t want to stain that,”
• On being sexually harassed by a show producer: "Fresh Off the Boat’ was my first-ever TV show. I was thrown into this world. I don’t have parents in the industry. And because I was 30, people thought I knew what I was doing. It made me paranoid and embarrassed." ABC, through a spokesman, declined to comment.
• Constance said she isn’t interested in pointing fingers, and writing the essay wasn’t about blaming the man or demanding accountability except for herself. She thinks her angry tweets about the show renewal were maybe a release valve and the culmination of negative emotions and frustrations at being forced to pretend that everything on the show was fine. “I felt betrayed and trapped,”
• On the social media backlash: "I try not to make myself out to be a hero. I try to make myself out to be a pretty normal person who has flaws like everybody else. I’m not really into the actor memoir where it’s like, ‘I overcame the odds, and I’m this person who was humble and just kept working. I was the victim.’ It’s less black and white than simply victim and perpetrator."
• She loves motherhood because it makes her feels more like herself than she has ever been before. It makes her be present, like the best moments in acting do.
• She becomes excited talking about books, expressing her admiration for Elizabeth Strout’s “Olive Kitteridge” and Sally Rooney’s “Beautiful World, Where Are You.”
• When asked if she had ever faced racism in her career, Constance says: “Whenever I didn’t get a part, I never thought it was because I was Asian, I always thought it was because I was not pretty enough or not talented enough. Now that I’m in Hollywood, I don’t think that’s the case. I see how the machine works. I think those casting decisions have more to do with public perception, social media numbers. But I think race plays into all of it.”
• On the eagerness in which people were willing to tear her down, which she recounts in tears: "When I spoke beautifully about representation, everyone loved it. But the second they had a chance to find a crack in my facade...It’s funny. It was almost gleeful. It was almost like they couldn’t wait to tear me down. I think the Asian community in Hollywood is still hyper-focused on positive representation, which to me is an illusion. Whole, human representation is more complex. And I think it’s interesting to me how, at that time, when I most could have used their help, they were the people who shamed me.”
• She, like everyone else, has a fascination with the Don't Worry Darling drama but tries not to dwell: "I’ve checked my own tendency to be curious about it. How many times has a male director not gotten along with their actor? When women aren’t perfect pictures of grace, when they have conflict, it somehow feels salacious. The key to stopping that type of gossip isn’t stopping your curiosity, because your curiosity is just that. It’s removing any unfair expectations you have of a woman’s behavior and being aware of when you assign that."
• She hopes to begin filming on the Crazy Rich Asians spin off next year.
• She's more or less quit social media except to promote projects.
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