The 'Fresh Off the Boat' actress almost attempted suicide after experiencing Twitter backlash.
Constance Wu's Twitter controversy landed her in the psych ward. In her new memoir, Making a Scene, the 40-year-old actress details the fallout of her 2019 tweets that lamented the season 6 renewal of her ABC sitcom, Fresh Off the Boat.
In her memoir, Wu explains that "the numbers pointed to cancellation" when season 5 wrapped, noting that "the last episode of the season had been written to function as a series finale" and that the original showrunner was set to depart.
Given all of that, Wu claims, her team asked ABC if she could pursue other projects. "While they didn’t make any promises, they gave us their blessing to do so," Wu writes. "Cancellation became a foregone conclusion."
But then, Wu's film, Crazy Rich Asians, became a box office smash.
"People started to wonder: Would the network really cancel FOTB when CRA had been such a success? When everyone was talking about the dearth of Asian American representation in Hollywood?" she writes. "But numbers being numbers, I still thought the show would be canceled."
So when she found out on Twitter that the show was renewed for a sixth season, Wu was taken "by surprise."
"Because of my studio contract, I’d have to drop everything else -- all the exciting jobs that the network had given us permission to pursue -- and return to FOTB," she writes. "The fresh start I’d looked forward to would have to wait."
Wu's tumultuous time during the show meant that its renewal left her with "overwhelming" feelings, "a tsunami crashing through my body."
"I had kept my head down and tolerated the discomfort for so long, trying to preserve everything for everybody else, and I just couldn’t do it anymore. I needed to put my feelings somewhere other than my own body, which was at capacity," Wu writes. "I didn’t think about the lack of context, didn’t care how bad it looked... I didn’t care how I sounded; I just needed to finally make a sound... I unleashed all my built-up feelings on social media."
And with that, she published her controversial tweets in which she expressed displeasure that the show would be back for another season.
"The backlash was immediate. Ungrateful b**ch. How dare she. Boo-hoo poor actress has to go back to her high-paying job!" Wu writes. "Then there was the schadenfreude that always follows a big social media scene. Seeing someone who was always so practiced suddenly lose control -- was entertainment. I became a headline, a meme, a springboard for righteous opinion. An ungrateful girl making a scene."
Amid the backlash, Wu "stooped looking" at social media, but still received DMs through email. One such message, from a former co-star, had a big impact.
"[She told] me that nothing I could ever do would make up for my atrocious behavior and disgusting ingratitude. How I had sullied the one shining beacon of hope for Asian Americans. How selfish I was to not consider everyone else’s jobs on the show," Wu claims. "She demanded I bake cookies for and grovel at the feet of [my co-star] Randall [Park] and every single crew member of FOTB but said even that wouldn’t be enough to make up for what I’d done. She told me how the show had been her nephew’s favorite, and how I had ruined it for him. That I’d devastated him and I would never, ever be able to make up for it."
That DM, Wu writes, made her "feel helpless and desperate, my heart full of sharp tacks."
"Why wouldn’t she believe my remorse? That I hurt as badly as she wanted me to?" Wu questions. "My head spinning, I realized I needed a wound to prove it, to prove that I hurt as bad as everyone said I deserved to hurt and it couldn’t be a little wound, it had to be the biggest wound in the world for it to be enough."
"That’s how I ended up clutching 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 or a violin string pulled tight enough to cut flesh," she continues. "The sound coursed through me and out of my fingertips like electricity as I started pulling myself over the railing."
A friend found her in time, though, and "pried me from the balcony edge and dragged me to the elevator and down into a cab, where she breathlessly called my publicist for help because she was scared for my life, but also scared of doing the wrong thing."
She wound up at the psychiatric ER of a mental hospital.
"I was dizzy, my puffy eyes blurred by tear-engorged contact lenses, my mouth pasty with unbrushed teeth, my hair in shambles because they even took away my hair elastics for fear I'd hurt myself with them," she recalls. "I spent that night on a cot in the empty waiting room, under surveillance. Weeping until the exhaustion wore me out. The next morning, I told the two intake counselors what happened. That I almost jumped. That I'm very impulsive... That I needed help."
And get help she did.
"Fresh Off the Boat changed my life, but not in the way you might expect," she writes. "Sure, it got me out of debt and launched my career, but what really changed my life for the better was the hard stuff. The social media backlash and hospital stay made me finally get help. I found a therapist who’d worked with high-profile actresses and musicians and understood my unusual circumstances."
When she returned to the set to film season 6, Wu apologized to her TV kids for her tweets and they responded with love. She then apologized to the rest show's cast and crew by reading a letter, and they supported her. Park, her co-lead, is the person Wu feels the "most lucky" to have in her corner.
"Having him as my costar for those tumultuous six years was like winning the lottery," she writes. "I don’t have enough words to ever express my enormous gratitude for his grace and patience. I am embarrassed I wasn’t as wonderful as him, but I aspire to be, and know I’m getting better every day. In terms of how to be a good human being, he is my gold standard."
As for how she looks back on her tweet scandal now, she thinks "the entire experience might have been a helpful filtering mechanism rather than a setback," one that allowed her to know who was really there for her and wasn't "swayed by false rumors or social media numbers."
"I’d spent so much of my public life worried about what people thought of me," she writes. "It was freeing to finally let that go."
When ET's Rachel Smith spoke to the actress at the premiere of her latest film, Lyle, Lyle, Crocodile, she opened up about the experience of writing her memoir.
"I write about a lot of different things and somebody just asking 'How are you?' or 'Are you OK?' is really important," she said. "I think a big theme... is how hard healing is, and how kids have big emotions, and you need to let them express it, and find a way to deal with it. That’s one of the overarching themes [of the book], which think this movie is about as well."
Making a Scene is out now.
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