Constance Wu Felt Set Up After Being “Mocked” by Simu Liu at Gala Over Her ‘Fresh Off the Boat’ Tweets

Constance Wu says she was hurt by some of the people she feels closest to just months after she attempted suicide. The Fresh Off the Boat actress appeared on Red Table Talk Wednesday (Oct. 5), where she got candid about the difficult reaction from her own community after her exasperated 2019 tweets about Fresh Off the Boat getting renewed.

Wu told RTT hosts Jada Pinkett Smith, Willow Smith, and Adrienne Banfield-Norris that she was especially upset while attending Character Media’s 2019 Unforgettable Gala, which took place shortly after her suicide attempt.

The Hustlers star had been hesitant to attend the gala because of the “controversy” surrounding her at the time, explaining, “if I go, people are just gonna want to talk about the tweets.”

Still, she decided to attend to for her “kids on the show,” but asked that nobody crack jokes at her expense during the event. Wu clarified on RTT that the organizers of the gala did not know about her suicide attempt at the time.

“I told them, ‘I don’t want anybody to make fun of it ’cause I’m still in a very raw place about it. I’m not ready to be mocked for it,'” she said, referring to her Fresh Off the Boat renewal tweets. “But I expressed that I can’t deal with that. They promised me. They said, ‘No, no, no, no. We love Constance. It’ll only be warm energy and positive vibes towards her.’

Despite the assurance she wouldn’t be made fun of, Wu said host Simu Liu immediately joked about her: “So I was like, ‘Okay, okay, I’ll go,’ and they sat me, like, in the front row and, like, had all these cameras on me and within ten minutes, the host of the show made a crack at me,” she said.

Wu continued, “I was sitting there alone, trying not to cry in a public setting and the whole audience was like, ‘Oh, shit!’ They had promised they wouldn’t mock me and they did it right off the bat. It almost felt like they were setting me up for it. And it truly felt like a betrayal from the Asian American community. A couple months prior to that, I was in the emergency room.”

Wu previously said she was taken to the psychiatric ER of a mental hospital after receiving backlash for her 2019 tweets, and has since sought help and found a therapist.

While Liu has apologized for his gala joke — Wu said on RTT that “he did the right thing and he apologized and it was a sincere apology” — she feels like she’s getting the cold shoulder from her community.

“I feel like they are avoiding me,” Wu said. “I feel the disapproval but rather than being blatant, the silence of how much people reached out to me before, pre-tweet versus post-tweet. And you can tell. The silence has an effect.”

Watch Wu’s Red Table Talk episode in the video above. Red Table Talk airs Wednesdays at 12 p.m ET on Facebook Watch.

If you or someone you know are experiencing suicidal thoughts, call the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline 24 hours a day, 7 days a week at 988.