Margaret Cho turned down Heated Rivalry role over fear of ICE detention
Margaret Cho turned down a role in Heated Rivalry (Getty Images | Crave)
Bisexual comedian and actress Margaret Cho has revealed that she turned down a role in the hit queer series Heated Rivalry because she was scared that she would be detained by ICE at the US border for speaking out against the Trump administration.
“Last year, I got a script for a pilot script for a show that I really loved, but it shot in Canada and I was so scared because I’m so vocal about hating ICE and hating this administration,” she told Matteo Lane and Nick Smith on a 7 May episode of their podcast I Never Liked You.
“I was like, I will get detained at the border and I will be put in ICE detention if I go, and I was struggling over it. I had to talk to all these people about it and I was super upset, and I said no,” she explained, before revealing: “It was Heated Rivalry.”
The show’s hosts gasped dramatically at the admission. “I know, isn’t that horrible?” Cho continued. “Because I love [series creator] Jacob Tierney also. The pilot was beautiful.”
When asked if she could still watch the series, Cho said: “I watched it. I hosted some rewatch parties and it kills me. Like, it kills me, and it’s all because of Trump.”
The hosts then asked if there was any hope for her to appear in season two, and she replied: “I asked them. We’ll see.”
‘It’s so terrifying to be a queer person’
As a member of the LGBTQ+ community, Cho has always been very vocal when it comes to queer issues.
When speaking about her role in queer horror film Queens of the Dead in October last year, she told PinkNews: “It’s so terrifying to be a queer person. It’s f****** scary to live in a queer body, live a queer life in the world that we live in.”
She continued: “I think horror helps us exorcise a lot of those demons where we can rehearse fear without real danger. I think that’s the need for queer people to watch horror. That’s the relationship that we have with it because we are usually in fear in life. So, why not have a safe place where we can work out those emotions through art?
“It’s a really important genre that I think that people don’t understand the necessity for for queerness in it. Which is why I love being a part of this project, which is so much [about] celebrating that.”
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