Comedian Margaret Cho is grateful to be alive after surviving showbiz in the ’90s.
The 51-year-old “Over the Moon” actress says years of therapy helped her overcome her body image issues that stemmed from early in her career.
“I was really caught up in the show business of the ’90s, where it became a very big issue for women in particular and … I think that was really damaging,” Cho told Page Six recently. “It was very hard to be in show business in the ’90s if you were a woman and young. I don’t know anyone that didn’t come out of that scarred.”
In 1994, Cho starred in the short-lived TV series “All-American Girl,” becoming the first female East Asian actor to star in a sitcom. Cho said network executives criticized her appearance, leading her to starve herself so much that by the time the pilot was filmed she had developed kidney failure.
“I am just so glad to have survived and so amazed to have been alive for as long as I have been,” she said, adding, “I never appreciated that age that I was. I think back to the 25-year-old, 30-year-old, I was so caught up in all the self-hatred that I didn’t want to feel, but was sort of pushed on me by society. If I had been able to get past that then I really would have been able to enjoy my life.”
The San Francisco-born comic says that now she has more control over her body image, conceding that “it’s taken a lot of therapy to get to that point.”
“It’s mostly, I’d like to take some control over my feelings about myself and looks now that I have this much time left on earth as opposed to before when it seemed like time was abundant so I could just be as rude and mean to myself as I wanted. Now I don’t know how much time I have left!”
Cho is currently starring in the Netflix animated movie, “Over the Moon,” about a girl who constructs a rocket ship and blasts off in the hopes of meeting a mythical moon goddess. The film also features the voices of Phillipa Soo, John Cho, and Ken Jeong.
She also plays a “Fairy Gay Mother” in the upcoming comedy, “Friendsgiving.”