Amanda Seales Speaks On Her Strained Relationship With ‘Insecure’ Co-Star Issa Rae: “She Was Not Empowering To Me”

Insecure actress Amanda Seales opened up about her experience working on the critically acclaimed HBO sitcom amid rumors that she was difficult to work with behind the scenes.

Speaking with former footballer Shannon Sharpe on his podcast Club Shay Shay, Seales shut down claims that she was a “mean girl” on the show, instead turning the table on series creator and star Issa Rae, claiming Rae did not “protect” her when conflict arose behind the scenes.

“There’s a whole narrative that is completely false that people keep spinning. They keep saying, you know, that I’m this mean girl on this set, that I harmed these people on this set,” Seales said. “I just want to point out something very basic. How can I be a mean girl on a set that ain’t my set? How? It’s your show. You are my boss. I don’t even have the capacity to be the mean girl here because you can fire me. There’s no way for me to be a mean girl in this situation.”

The actress explained that much of the tension between her and Rae reached a breaking point when Rae’s publicist, Vanessa Anderson, had Seales kicked out of an Emmys party in 2019. Seales claimed that she was barred from the party on two separate occasions that evening and was later kicked out by security even after she was personally escorted in by one of the event planners.

According to Seales, Rae reached out days later to maintain that she “had nothing to do with it.”

“I’ve never talked about this publicly because it has always been incredibly important for me to protect Issa… I know that her role is very important,” Seales explained. “And so I’ve always protected Issa, however, there’s just been enough instances at this point where I should have been protected by Issa and I wasn’t… Now it’s at a point where my protecting of Issa has been turned onto me and people have been using it against me.”

Seales later said that she felt like it was Rae’s responsibility to mediate the conflict between herself and Anderson, but Rae allegedly did not intervene, even as Anderson went on what Seales described as a “smear campaign” against her. She also claimed that when they returned to set after the incident, none of her co-stars mentioned it or showed any support.

“I’m looking at Issa because it’s like it is your responsibility, we are both your employees, this is a part of leadership,” she said.

The Insecure star also pointedly disagreed with Sharpe’s point that Rae is “very empowering to women.”

“She wasn’t empowering to me. She didn’t feel like I was needed,” Seales said. “She didn’t feel like I deserved to be protected. I’m only giving a portion of the situation. But that was my experience. And nonetheless, I have still always protected her because I felt like it was my responsibility to do so. But it is not.”