Margaret Cho has revealed she was offered a part in HBO’s gay hockey romance series Heated Rivalry, but turned it down out of fear that she might get detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement at the Canadian border, where it was filmed.
The San Francisco-born stand-up comedian, 57, who has been a vocal critic of President Donald Trump and his controversial immigration policies, made the surprising revelation on a recent episode of the I Never Liked You podcast.
“Last year, I got a pilot script for a show that I really loved, but it shot in Canada,” Cho said.
“And I was so scared because I’m so vocal about hating ICE and hating this administration. I was like, I will get detained at the border and I will be put in ICE detention if I go,” she added. “I was struggling over it. I had to talk to all of these people about it. And I was super upset about it, and I said no. And it was Heated Rivalry.”
Cho said she’s since become a huge fan of the series, starring Connor Storrie and Hudson Williams as hockey players on rival teams who fall into a secret romance.
“I’ve watched it. I’ve hosted some rewatch parties, and I’m like it kills me, like it kills me because of Trump,” the comedian sighed. While she didn’t specify which character she would have played, she commended the actor who was cast in the role.
She confirmed that she has asked the show’s creators about a season two appearance. “We’ll see,” Cho teased.
The Drop Dead Diva alum previously slammed Trump as “abhorrent” in a 2015 interview with The Daily Beast.
“I really do believe that it’s something to distract us from the real problem,” she said of his first presidential run, “which is that we’re going to lose a huge part of women’s health care that is vital to the survival of women, the health of women, and the sanity of women. So I think it’s a red herring. I think Donald Trump is not really there for any purpose other than to distract.”
Cho later admitted in 2021 to The Guardian that she loves “to Donald Trump-bash and blame him for any reason I can.”
“But the fact is that his casual racism is more a symptom of the greater problem than the cause of this,” she said, referring to the rise in anti-Asian violence at the time. “It’s about the repetitive nature of hate crimes and how they’re not new, even if they seem new, because they’re presented as shocking and new by the news.
She also opened up about fearing for her personal safety as a Korean-American, saying: “I’m really scared. It’s kind of like: how do you escape your skin? I limit my time out and I think it’s awful to acknowledge that.”
