{"id":87284,"date":"2022-10-05T02:38:15","date_gmt":"2022-10-05T02:38:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/harchi90.com\/constance-wus-making-a-scene-most-revealing-moments\/"},"modified":"2022-10-05T02:38:15","modified_gmt":"2022-10-05T02:38:15","slug":"constance-wus-making-a-scene-most-revealing-moments","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/harchi90.com\/constance-wus-making-a-scene-most-revealing-moments\/","title":{"rendered":"Constance Wu’s ‘Making a Scene’: Most Revealing Moments"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Constance Wu has been making scenes all her life. The actress, who led the box-office darling Crazy Rich Asians<\/em> and later became an unexpected star in hustlers,<\/em> found herself making her biggest scene when she shared a series of strongly worded tweets after the surprise season-six renewal of the show that made her famous, ABC’s Fresh Off the Boat. <\/em>Her behavior, which she addresses head-on in her new memoir, Making a Scene<\/em>, which is out today, gave her a reputation for being a diva, and now, more than three years later, she’s ready to explain. Throughout the book, Wu describes some of the most difficult and harrowing moments of her life, sometimes in memoir format, sometimes adopting the role of a screenwriter with scripts telling the story of her life. Wu wrote Making a Scene<\/em> to give context to her \u201cbig feelings,\u201d including some early-life indignities, later traumas, and self-analysis. Below, seven stories that reveal it all.<\/p>\n

While Making a Scene<\/em> details the most difficult and traumatic moments of Wu’s life, she says the one that \u201churts the most,\u201d happened in eighth grade when she was accused of plagiarism. Wu’s teacher, described as having \u201cthe ballsy attitude of Elaine Stritch and the self-satisfied charm of Fran Drescher,\u201d gave the class their first writing assignment, and when the time came to turn in their papers, Wu’s opening paragraph on Beethoven was deemed too good. \u201cYou are not good enough to have written this,\u201d Wu claims her teacher told her. When she couldn’t find proof of the plagiarism, the teacher asked Wu’s other teachers if they thought she could have written it. Notably, the only one who said he believed she could was the drama teacher. \u201cSo that’s <\/em>why I became an actor,\u201d Wu says. \u201cOf course I did.\u201d<\/p>\n

The daughter of two Taiwanese immigrants, Wu grew up in the Virginia suburbs. Despite being one of the few Asians in her town, she says she did n’t always claim her \u201cAsian-ness\u201d very loudly, and she resented Asian characters onscreen who spoke with accents. \u201cIt was like in that movie Jurassic Park<\/em> when they figured out the T. rex can’t see you if you don’t move<\/em>,\u201d she wrote. \u201cAnytime an Asian brought attention to their Asian-ness on TV, it was like they were running around in front of a T. rex. Shut up! go away! <\/em>I wanted to yell at them. Stop making us look bad.<\/em>\u201d Not until she was cast on Fresh Off the Boat<\/em> as Jessica Huang, a Taiwanese mother who has an accent, was Wu able to embrace her identity. \u201cThe softest spot of all was her Asian-ness \u2014 every demeanor, every values, every accent,\u201d she writes. \u201cShe She was n’t trying to avoid the T. rex; she she was taunting it.\u201d<\/p>\n

Wu learned to love the character \u2014 not despite her \u201cstereotypical\u201d qualities but because of them. \u201cThere are real people who genuinely embody stereotypical attributes \u2014 they’re our mothers and fathers, our uncles and aunts, our brainy cousins \u200b\u200b\u2014 I don’t want to hide their voices or their stories,\u201d she explains. \u201cStereotypes are not harmful for their mere existence; they’re harmful for their reduction <\/em>of a person or group.\u201d<\/p>\n

Fresh Off the Boat<\/em> was an innovative sitcom for its portrayal of an Asian American family, but that doesn’t mean working on the set was easy. One of the most harrowing moments in Wu’s memoir is her description of working with an abusive producer she refers to as M\u2014. She describes him as <\/em><\/strong>a controlling man: He allegedly made Wu fire her agent in favor of one he preferred, told her to wear shorter skirts, and <\/strong>repeatedly told her, “You do what I say.” The story of their time together culminates in a scene, written in script form, that is an amalgamation of a few stories. In the scene, M\u2014 persuades Wu to go to a Lakers game with him and then allegedly touches her against her will. He puts his hand on her thigh, Wu claims, saying, \u201cYour skin is so smooth.\u201d Then, \u201cShe swats his hand away in a nonthreatening, playful way. M\u2014 grins and tightens his grip, moving his hand farther up her inner thigh<\/em>\u201d Ultimately, “She tries to push his hand away again. He moves it up to graze her thigh<\/em>\u201d When Wu forcefully tells him to stop, he allegedly <\/strong>tells her she has big arms.<\/p>\n

Perhaps the most publicized Wu story occurred when Fresh Off the Boat<\/em> was surprisingly renewed for a sixth season. In response, Wu tweeted, \u201cSo upset right now that I’m literally crying. Ugh. Fuck,\u201d followed by a series of other negative tweets about the show’s renewal. \u201cSuddenly, everything I’d held back for so long flooded the atmosphere and I felt like the hot microwaved tomato all over again,\u201d she writes in her book. \u201cI didn’t care how I sounded; I just needed to finally make a sound<\/em>\u201d<\/p>\n

The overwhelming, extremely negative response to her tweets, which included several DMs from a former colleague admonishing her, made Wu feel completely \u201chelpless and desperate.\u201d After a friend found her \u201cclutching the balcony railing of my fifth-floor apartment and staring wildly down at the NYC street below with a reckless despair so total that my body ceased being a body and became a sound so dangerously high-pitched it was like nails on a chalkboard,\u201d she ended up at a hospital. Despite this, she did n’t actually check herself in because she did n’t want her \u201chospital stay to become news.\u201d Instead, she slept on a cot in the waiting room. While she says she never actually came close to harming herself over the reaction to her tweets, she did start therapy.<\/p>\n

One of the most difficult-to-read essays in the book details <\/strong>Wu’s rape at 22. She describes a date with a 36-year-old man who, after some \u201cfooling around,\u201d started putting on a condom, \u201can obvious signal for sex \u2014 which I did note <\/em>want.\u201d Then, despite her telling him multiple times that she didn’t want to have sex with him, he raped her. <\/strong>Afterward, he gave her a 20-page medieval-fantasy manuscript he had written for her after their first date called \u201cThe Beating Heart of the Forest.\u201d Wu says she blocked the story from her mind until one day it all came back. \u201cI was on a plane from Singapore, where I had finished filming Crazy Rich Asians<\/em>,\u201d she wrote. \u201cI’d just woken up from a nap when the realization hit me like a flood. That was rape.\u201d Despite that, “I couldn’t call it ‘rape,'” for a long time. Now with help from her therapist, Wu is ready to call it what it was. \u201cI did not consent to sex. Maybe it wasn’t violent, but it was rape. Period.\u201d<\/p>\n

If Wu is known for being difficult, then Making a Scene<\/em>‘s intention is not to completely deny her behavior but to explain it. Wu says much of her difficult behavior on set was linked to M\u2014’s inappropriate behavior. <\/strong>\u201cBut repressed feelings don’t just disappear because you will them to, and they inevitably come out in other ways: paranoia, jealousy, isolation,\u201d she writes. \u201cUncharacteristic, illogical behavior followed.\u201d That included a time she blew up at her co-star Randall Park after he did a radio interview she was supposed to be a part of but was excluded from. It wasn’t Park’s fault, she acknowledges, \u201cbut I remained upset, punished him for days by pouting every time he came near me.\u201d<\/p>\n

One of the most surprising moments in Making a Scene<\/em> is when Wu apologizes for her own instance of sexual harassment. \u201cI am guilty of sexual harassment. Ugh being <\/em>the harasser,\u201d she says. \u201cI had a problem: I couldn’t stop writing the word penis<\/em>\u201d It turns out that while on Fresh Off the Boat<\/em>Wu got annoyed one day that the word boob<\/em> was a punch line to a joke, so she decided that if boobs were jokes, then penises should be too. She wrote the word penis<\/em> very regularly while playing Jessica Huang: \u201cEvery time you saw my character writing on a legal pad, signing a check, or making a grocery list, I was writing the word penis<\/em> over and over again.\u201d Then someone on the crew complained about it being \u201cinappropriate,\u201d and one of the producers had to ask Wu to stop. Now she’s very sorry for putting someone else in an uncomfortable situation. \u201cI apologize and I recognize the problem,\u201d she says. \u201cThis is an earnest apology. From the bottom of my boob, I am sorry.\u201d<\/p>\n

If you or someone you know is in crisis, please call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 1-800-273-TALK (8255) or contact the Crisis Text Line by texting TALK to 741741.<\/em><\/p>\n