Comedian Margaret Cho has candidly spoken about her recent battles with substance abuse that saw her spend a long stint in rehab.
Speaking to The Guardian, Cho spoke in-depth about her career, Hollywood’s pressure on women and her recent battles with substance abuse.
Recent years have seen a lot of changes in Cho’s life. In 2015 she filed for divorce from husband, artist Al Ridenour. The couple had been married for 12 years.
The following year her friends invited her to a birthday party, but it was really an intervention, with her friends demanding Cho take action on her alcohol and opiate addiction.
“I was tricked,” Cho said. “They took me to a birthday party and it wasn’t a birthday party. It was my intervention.”
The comedian spent 18 months at the treatment facility and it was turning point where she began to address past traumas and issues she’d been ignoring for years.
“The thing about opiates is that it’s not really a high, it’s a removal of you caring, but you still feel the pain, you still feel the anguish. Only the choice of whether or not to care about it is removed chemically.” Cho said.
The time away from the spotlight has allowed Cho to think about some the incidents that have occurred during her career from being sexually harassed, to network TV executives demanding she rapidly lose weight, and incidents of racism.
With most of the world in lockdown a returning to being a touring comic is off the agenda for now, so Cho’s been keeping busy with her podcast The Margaret Cho: Mortal Majority. It’s a space where she discusses the wave of racism Asian Americans face in the wake n the Covid-19 crisis, as well as the treatment of women.
OIP Staff
Love OUTinPerth Campaign
Help support the publication of OUTinPerth by contributing to our
GoFundMe campaign.
