Glee star Amber Riley talks Lea Michele’s alleged racism on Ziwe
Fellow actor Samantha Marie Ware previously said that Michele bullied her on the set of the teen musical
Aux News Amber Riley
A new season of Ziwe has arrived, and with it, more of the most uncomfortable interviews you’ll ever see. In this week’s episode, onetime Glee cast member Amber Riley sits down with Ziwe Fumudoh on the comedian’s eponymous show, and naturally, the conversation veers towards her former co-star Lea Michele’s alleged racist bullying.
Back in 2020, Samantha Marie Ware, who appeared on 11 episodes of the teen musical, tweeted that Michele “made [her] first television gig a living hell” and perpetrated numerous “traumatic microagressions that made [her] question a career in Hollywood.” After losing a brand partnership with HelloFresh, the actor responded with a Notes app apology, because apparently that’s what celebrities do.
“You said that one of your famous coworkers wasn’t racist. Did you mean that she was?” Ziwe asks, referring to one of Riley’s past interviews.
“I don’t know which coworker you’re talking about, I had so many,” Riley responds–with a wink. (Because this is Ziwe, she is visibly stressed and tries to dodge the question at first.)
The controversy recently resurfaced after Michele landed one of Broadway’s most coveted roles as Fanny Brice in Funny Girl. Her casting coincided with fellow Glee alum Jane Lynch departing the show, stoking speculation that there was lingering bad blood between the former co-stars.
“Would you say that your famous coworker doesn’t see race and is in fact rude to all of her coworkers?” Ziwe continues.
“I think that she would probably say she doesn’t see race, but as we discussed earlier, everyone does,” Riley says.
Elsewhere in the clip, the recent Dancing With The Stars winner does not seem to look back on her Glee experience with particular fondness.
“We have diversity training on our show,” Ziwe tells her.
“I wish our show had that,” Riley laughs. “We did not.”
Ziwe is now airing on Showtime.
40 Comments
So is Lea Michele racist or not?
Until you open the box and the wavefunction collapses she’s technically both.
Schrodinger’s brat
I’m sure her box’s cat is dead.
So the dead cat is racist?
Ah yes, Schrödinger’s diva.
I think the common consensus is that Michele is a terrific singer, a passable enough actress, and generally rude, mean, and diva-ish. This is surprising to exactly nobody. Is she racist? Probably not in the ‘Proud Boy’ way or even in the ‘considers voting Republican’ way. But I’d bet a substantial amount it’s in the ‘assuming the POC is the assistant rather than boss’ and ‘willing to throw language around when she’s not getting what she wants’ way.
Or we could just document some racist stuff she’s said and done? Wouldn’t that be easier?
From a previous article, the complaint I vaguely remember was that Lea asked the actress if her hair was a wig. Not sure if there was more than that.
Yeah I was wondering if we’d get to some examples.Like, I don’t find it at all unbelievable that Lea Michele would do or say something racist, but like, has she? Or is she just generally rude and dismissive?I’m always a little leery of “microaggressions” as a token of racism because the term is used for everything from blatant outright racist stuff, where there is nothing micro about it, just straight-up horrifying racism, all the way to “Anything anyone disagrees with me about, no matter their race, no matter how mild the disagreement, is a racist microaggression”.
I think this is it. She’s mean and not particularly clever so she goes for obvious things she thinks will hurt people. You’re fat, you’re short, you’re tall, you’re mannish, you’ve got freckles. A Black woman has fake hair, a hispanic woman is the maid. The eye-rollingly obvious insults of the mean dummy.
Maybe your typical white person casual racist, not full on Imperial Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan racist.
Racism has lost all meaning///// Lea is a mini-micro agreesor
What do you need them to spell it out for you?
She’ll be very upset when she reads about this…
If she can read this.
Yeah, that was the joke. Good job.
Thank you.
It has been many years, although this is a very interesting thing to read when I think about the storylines Lea Michelle and Amber Riley had on Glee …
Why would anyone appear on this show? At least with the Sacha Baron Cohen stuff, they don’t know the host is actively trying to humiliate them.
Because it’s a fuckin awesome show
Probably they enjoy the challenge and/or humor. It’s like people agreeing to be on Between Two Ferns. It’s riskier than that since she touches on more sensitive topics, but I feel like the ones where it’s actually embarrassing are people who’ve got something to prove and then get overly defensive. The people who have humility and a sense of humor about it just come off like good sports for handling the ribbing.See the Adam Pally interview for an example of the latter:
The best guess was Chet Haze because he didn’t apologize and just didn’t let anything “phase” him. It was the one person I heard of that beat Ziwe at her own game.
I haven’t seen his full interview but from the clips I agree he seemed unphased. He’s kind of an exception to the rule as he handled it alright because he was so unapologetic, but he is still just an embarrassment in general lol. I’ll concede that the interview probably didn’t do much to change opinion of him either way since it’s hard to further embarrass someone who’s already chaotic on social media.
Yeah Chet Haze sucks, but I admire his complete lack of shame and the tables turning.
Low stakes. He has no career to lose. Nobody likes him so why would he pretend to care? Just happy somebody wants to interview him.
You don’t phase The Haze!
are you impersonating recognitions and praising Chet Haze? damn, these false flag operations are just getting nasty
You may have seen more of this show than me, but on Between Two Ferns, they work with the guest on the script, and any ad-libs that they think go over the line, they’ll cut. This show seems expressly set up to embarrass the guests.
Ah, got it. I knew they had writers but I assumed it was mostly just for the interview questions because the guests’ reactions seemed fairly genuine. Granted, I’ve only watched the movie and haven’t seen that many of the videos before that.I’m not sure how Ziwe works and how much they tell them beforehand, but yeah I doubt they give guests things to say. Like I said though, the actual embarrassment depends on the guests. The comedians tend to do fine because they don’t take it too seriously and/or she’s actually friends with them. And the one mentioned here is more embarrassing for Lea Michele than Amber Riley.
Between Two Ferns is actually mostly scripted, with the guests’ prior approval.
S… this is an article, huh? a whole article about a non-answer to a single question on an irrelevant talk show. Wow. Embarrassing…
I really don’t think what she said was worth writing about. Speculation is not confirming or denying.
Especially when the only concrete example seems to be ‘microaggressions’
I dunno about show biz but microaggessions, and not just racist ones, in the office can be intolerable. Fear and anxiety is no way to run things.
True, but when a person is just generally a mean person and treats everyone like shit, they aren’t necessarily a racist for using microaggressions against black people. That’s just what mean people do…they look for things you’re sensitive about and poke at them. Now I have no clue what actually went on with that show/cast back in the day, but all the things that I remember being alleged were just general “star fucking with the lower billed actors” type of things and not specifically about the person’s race.
In Scotland, they call them “Wee aggressions”.
The AV Club!!!
HUMAN BEING WITH A PULSE WHO IS KNOWN TO BE A BITCH MIGHT ALSO BE RACIST!
More at 11!
Ziwe’s show feels like one that will not age well. You can notice it a bit whenever she gets any kind of pushback, she’s the type of person who both picks easy targets and is more than happy to dish it out, but can’t handle it when it comes back at her.