Despite all the sisterhood on display in Issa Rae‘s hit HBO series Insecure, actress Amanda Seales was so turned off by the behind-the-scenes drama she almost stopped acting for good.
Seales, who plays Tiffany DuBois, recently appeared on Jemele Hill’s Unbothered podcast, where she said she was ready to leave the entertainment industry after being snubbed by her own co-stars.
“I mean being kicked out of an Emmy party for no f—g reason,” she said. “I mean that was one of the things that was kind of like a pinnacle point where it was just like if this is what it’s about to be in the mix of this, I don’t want to be in the mix of this. This is corny.”
Back in 2019, Seales revealed four security guards and a white woman named Kiara escorted her out of an Emmy soiree.
“For the record, I am being
denied entrance to the Black people’s Emmy party,” Seales said in an Instagram Story video posted from outside the event. “And it’s a white woman telling me I can’t go in. I just want to put this on record that I am literally being told, ‘You cannot get entrance into a party that Jesse Williams invited me to.’ That is the only Black event for the Emmy weekend because a white woman is telling me I can’t get in. But I’m fine.”Later in the video, she called out the “hater” who requested that she be denied entry into the Celebrate The Culture II party.
“Some hater b***h, or some hater n***a, put the battery in her back,” Seales said at the time. “When we do that s**t, and we empower s**t like that, it just really shows how powerless we really are to our ego, and to pettiness. And I really just feel sorry for those folks. Because they really think they’re doing something, and you’re not. Because I still look bomb as s**t even though I was standing on the street corner.”
In the weeks after the snub, Seales revealed on her podcast that it was Issa Rae’s publicist who had her escorted out.
Now, two years later, Seales credits it with being the “final straw” that almost sent her into early retirement.
“It was a final straw, and if you’re this town it’s a very small town. Black Hollywood is a very small enclave of people, and so it was like a moment in time where I just realized, like what I had imagined I was walking into was actually the opposite, and that was a very jarring thing for me to kind of really grasp,” she said.
Now in its final season, fans have noticed Seales has refrained from posting any group photos with her co-stars promoting the show. The only post on her page about the show highlights her husband on the show Wade Allain-Marcus.
Seales has moved on from the experience. “Instead of walking away, in my newfound unbotheredness, I found a second wind, like a new strength to say, ‘Nah, those other things those were surface, and you love them, but this is purpose,'” she told Hill.