Issa Rae Is Reportedly Done Working With Amanda Seales
Written by djfrosty on September 29, 2024
Source: Bernard Smalls / @PhotosByBeanz83
Issa Rae confirmed that she has no interest in working with Amanda Seales in a recent appearance in New York.
It looks as if there will be no future collaborations between Insecure star and writer Issa Rae and former co-star Amanda Seales, based on comments Rae recently made. The Breakfast Club aired comments that were recorded at an event for Viarae, the star’s prosecco brand, which was held in Brooklyn, New York. In the clip, Rae was asked if there was anyone whom she would never work with again. “I mean, anybody who’s on a podcast to talk shit about me,” she responded at the 2:03 mark, adding: “I’ve had great experiences with everybody I’ve worked with though. So for the most part, like, I’m always grateful when people come back.”
The audience immediately went into a frenzy, realizing that Rae was likely referring to Seales, who in her appearance on Shannon Sharpe’s Club Shay Shay podcast in April said she was done protecting Issa because she felt she wasn’t vested in the best interests of Black women overall. Seales referred to the 2019 incident between her and Rae’s publicist, Vanessa Anderson, when Anderson requested that Seales be removed from an Emmy Awards party Rae was hosting. Seales then recalled that Rae called her directly to express that the ejection was not her doing and arranged a phone call between Anderson and Seales to patch things up.
Seales would go on to state that Rae’s failure to promote her show, Get Your Life (which was under Rae’s HOORAE Media) and Anderson initiating a “smear campaign” against her that Rae didn’t intervene in left tensions on the Insecure set heightened and made her feel unprotected while there.
“They keep saying, you know, that I’m this mean girl on this set, that I harmed these people on this set,” Seales said. “I just want to point out something very basic. How can I be a mean girl on a set that ain’t my set? How? It’s your show. You are my boss. I don’t even have the capacity to be the mean girl here because you can fire me,” she added, continuing: “So there’s no way for me to be a mean girl in this situation. And I know some people that may buck up against, like, the confirmation bias that they’ve created, but it simply is the truth.”