Constance Wu has revealed that her early years on Fresh Off the Boat weremarred by some unwanted attention from a producer.
“I kept my mouth shut for a really long time about a lot of sexual harassmentand intimidation that I received the first two seasons of the show,” she saidFriday at the Atlantic Festival in Washington DC, per The HollywoodReporter. “Because, after the first two seasons, once it was a success, onceI was no longer scared of losing my job, that’s when I was able to startsaying ‘no’ to the harassment, ‘no’ to the intimidation, from this particularproducer. And, so I thought: “You know what? I handled it, nobody has to know,I don’t have to stain this Asian American producer’s reputation, I don’t haveto stain the reputation of the show.” “
Wu starred in the hit sitcom as Jessica Huang, the mother in a Taiwanese-American family living in Orlando, Fla., in the late ’90s. She played thecharacter for all six seasons, which aired from Feb. 2015 to Feb. 2020.Experiences she had there and elsewhere are part of her memoir, Making aScene , which comes out Oct. 4.
Constance Wu and Randall Park star in a 2015 episode of Fresh Off the Boat.(Photo: Tyler Golden/ABC/courtesy Everett Collection)
She explained that her publisher, Simon & Schuster, encouraged her to be openabout what happened. And at first, she wrote about it as an exercise.
“And then I eventually realized it was important to talk about, because I didhave a pretty traumatic experience in my first couple years on that show, andnobody knew about it.” Wu said. “Because that show was historic for AsianAmericans. And it was the only show on network television in over 20 years tostar Asian Americans, and I did not want to sully the reputation of the oneshow we had representing us.”
ABC did not respond to Yahoo Entertainment’s request for comment.
In a story about the book, also published Friday, the New York Times reported that Wu offers more detail on the situation there. She uses only aninitial to identify the “senior member of the production team,” and writesthat he “controlled her, demanding that she run all her business matters pasthim and telling her what to wear” in her first year on the show. She allegedthat the man had once put his hand on her thigh and grazed her crotch, butthat, by the second season, she felt empowered to say no to the man. Theirshow was a hit.
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” Fresh Off the Boat was my first-ever TV show,” Wu told the newspaper. “Iwas thrown into this world. I don’t have parents in the industry. And becauseI was 30, people thought I knew what I was doing. It made me paranoid andembarrassed.”
She and her harasser stopped speaking after she refused to go to a filmfestival with him.
Wu said at the DC appearance that the harassment was part of the reason shewas ready for Fresh off the Boat to end.
The actress controversially tweeted in 2019 that she was upset her show hadbeen renewed, a message that was not well received on social media. Shestopped tweeting for almost three years.
As she returned to the platform in July, she wrote that she had becomeconvinced that she should end her life over the situation. “3 years ago, whenI made careless tweets about the renewal of my TV show, it ignited outrage andinternet shaming that got pretty severe. I felt awful about what I’d said,”she wrote, “and when a few DMs from a fellow Asian actress told me l’d becomea blight on the Asian American community, I started feeling like I didn’t evendeserve to live anymore. Looking back, it’s surreal that a few DMs convincedme to end my own life, but that’s what happened. Luckily, a friend found meand rushed me to the ER. It was a scary moment that made me reassess a lot inmy life. “
On Friday, she mentioned how the harassment played into the feelings that shehad tweeted.
“I wanted to have a fresh slate where I didn’t have to start a show with allthese memories of abuse,” Wu said. “A few people knew [the harassment] washappening, and to go to work every day and see those people who knew that hewas sexually harassing me being ‘buddy-buddy’ with him felt like a betrayalevery time. I loved everybody on that crew, and I loved working on that show,but it had that history of abuse, that it started with, and even though Ihandled it after two years, I was looking forward to a clean slate.”
Wu said she couldn’t have written her book three years ago, because she wasstill “raw” and “wounded” over the suicide attempt, but she’d taken time toheal.
“I felt ready and capable, and I thought it was important for me to helppeople,” she said.
She teared up as she noted that she decided to rejoin social media because thepeople she wants to help are more likely to be there than reading books like