Margaret Cho has never been
shy about talking about her personal issues with weight. So it wasn’t a total
surprise when she ended up in the cast of Drop
Dead Diva. The series tells the tale of Deb, an aspiring model that dies in
a car accident and winds up in the body of a plus-sized lawyer named Jane
Bingham. Cho plays the sassy secretary with a heart of gold.
In a recent conference
call, we asked the comedian-turned-actress whose body she’d pick if she could
be magically transported like her TV boss. The stand-up who famously battled
network execs over her size during the run of her short-lived sitcom All-American Girl, answered, “I would
like my body from when I was five. It was a really good… When I was five,
that’s when I started dieting and wrecked it. I shouldn’t have started dieting
so young. But my mother was always on diets and then she always wanted me to be
as perfect as possible. Unfortunately that was the wrong answer.”
She took a moment to issue
a short PSA on body image to anyone who’ll listen. “Please people with children
do not make your kids go on a diet. It just makes them set up for failure in
the future.”
She added, “I always look
at pictures of myself when I was like five, six, seven and think, ‘Well, I was
the perfect weight then.” I would like to go back to that. That’s really sick I
know and is wrong, but I never really had a chance as a kid and I grew up to be
a very overweight teenager. So it’s very difficult for me to find body
satisfaction… Now I really focused on getting happiness with myself from within
and… Drop Dead Diva really helps me
do that.”
Cho also reflected on the
ways that she differs from her Diva
character. “I, in real life, never wear long pants and this is all Teri wears. So
that’s probably the major difference between our characters. Also I’ve never
really had a job like that. I’ve never worked in an office. I’ve never had a
nine to five. So I guess Teri is me if I were forced to actually have a real
job and have to sort of dress conservatively and have a boss. Although she
doesn’t really consider Jane a boss. She considers Jane a friend. So we are
similar and different. Also Margaret, myself, I have a lot tattoos; Teri Lee
has none.”
Of course that could
change. Cho admitted that she her character continues to evolve. “What’s great
about it is that I’ve never actually played a character for this long. I’ve
done films and I’ve done pilots and I’ve done series but never longer than a
year. So to come back to the third year, to complete the third year of playing
this character, I feel like I know a lot more about her and how to play her and
it helps me a lot as an actor.”
She also credits her Diva co-stars for helping her develop in
her part on the show and “working with the incredible Brooke Elliot, who is
really one of the greatest actors on television out there today. I’ve learned
so much from her. What’s great is to be around all these talented people and
learning so much that’s what really informs me more than my own idea of what
the character is. It’s interacting with these other great, fantastic performers
that’s helped me grow.”
But at heart, Cho
acknowledged that she’ll always be a comedian first and foremost. And she’ll
always use her humor to do good around the world. She remarked, “Comedy is
actually one of the most effective agents for social change. And you see in
television. This is very true when you think about people like Jon Stewart or
Stephen Colbert, but also in our show where we deal with a lot of social issues
that are very important.”
She added, “Coming up is an
episode about the gay prom, which was a real thing that happened really not far
from where we shoot Drop Dead Diva in
the South where these two young women wanted to go to the prom together. And
the prom was canceled because the school didn’t want to support a same-sex
couple going to prom. And this was such a heartbreaking story in the news, and
so we did a show about it and it was really powerful.”
She noted that a very
special guest lent her voice to the episode’s topic as well. “On that show
Wanda Sykes, who was heavily involved in that case and publicizing it played a
judge... And also one of the girls who was actually the girl just trying to go
to the prom with her girlfriend, Constance, came and played a bailiff. So we
had a lot of really great moments in that episode.”
A bi-sexual herself and gay
rights activist in real life, the topic is very dear to Cho’s heart. “It was a
really great show of support for gay pride, which is an issue that I am
constantly, constantly, constantly promoting. And it just makes me feel good
that we got to do that. And so I feel like television comedy, and comedy in
general, is a really important avenue — a really important way, a venue, to
change society and to grow and I’m so proud that we got to do that.”
For related stories check out:
No comments:
Post a Comment