‘A lot of it was fear-driven’: Constance Wu reveals she got into $40,000 of credit card debt in her twenties

Costance Wu has revealed that she found herself in $40,000 (£36,000) worth of credit card debt when she was in her twenties.

The Crazy Rich Asians actor was speaking to Meghan Markle on the Duchess of Sussex’s latest episode of her podcast, Archetypes.

When Meghan asked how Wu was in her twenties, Wu, 40, replied: “Oh, my God. I mean, messy… broke. I was over $40,000 just in credit card debt.”

She explained: “That doesn’t even include student loan debt. And I didn’t even care about it. I was really reckless about my spending. And I also, like, partied a lot. I drank a lot. I dated around, I did drugs.

“I did all these wild things under the guise of, ‘Oh, I’m so free, this is so fun.’ But a lot of it was fear driven. I just, I was trying to avoid something.”

When Meghan asked Wu what she was trying to avoid, Wu responded: “I think, I mean, you you were an actress and um…” to which Meghan said: “Mm-hm. Past life. Yeah.”

Wu continued: “I’d been an actor since I was a kid. And I wanted it so much, and I was constantly getting rejected and saying that it hurts when you’re rejected – that’s actually harder than the rejection, admitting that it got to you.

“And so I think when you’re like, ‘I don’t give a fuck. I’m just going to drink, like, whatever. I’m a wild party girl,’ then it’s a way of saying, ‘Oh yeah, they can’t hurt me,’ when really you’re like, ‘I’m really hurt. And I’m really scared that I’m not going to make it, like, in this thing’,”

Elsewhere in the 55-minute interview, Wu revealed how she dealt with the backlash she saw in 2019, when she tweeted that she was “crying” after her show Fresh Off the Boat was renewed.

“Three years ago, my TV show was renewed and I had a – a pretty careless moment where I was alone and frustrated and feeling emotional after having repressed a lot of feelings for like six years on that show.

“Because even though I loved being on that show and I loved almost everybody on it, I mean, people don’t know that the first year I was going through sexual harassment by one of the producers and intimidation and I think part of the reason my outburst on Twitter three years ago over the show’s renewal was so – was so seemingly out of character is because it was the buildup of several years of repressing a type of abuse that I had encountered at the hands of a producer.”

She continued: “This was before the MeToo movement, right? So I didn’t really have any platform to feel, like, comfortable talking about it. And also, the show was such a shining beacon for Asian-American representation, I didn’t want to tarnish the one beacon that we had available to us.”

Wu said that tweet, and the backlash that came from it, is what prompted her to “get off social media, put my career aside and focus on my mental health”.

If you have experienced sexual assault you can call the Rape Crisis national freephone helpline on 0808 802 9999 which is open from 12 to 2.30pm and 7 to 9.30pm every day of the year.