Margaret Cho sacrificed an “all-white” outfit — and her car — to a weight-loss drug decades ago.
The comedian admitted on the “How to Fail With Elizabeth Day” podcast Wednesday that she “couldn’t control” her bowels while taking an unspecified pill to slim down, which led to her once pooping her pants onstage.
“I started … taking these drugs that would remove the fat from the food that you ate,” the actress, 57, recalled, comparing what came out of her body to “pepperoni grease that you blot on top of a pizza.”
She went on to tell listeners about the time she “s–t [this] out” during a comedy set while “killing it” onstage in a white “dress and pants combination.”
Cho remembered, “It was starting to come out because it was all oil. It was just grease because it was fat. I started spurting orange grease out of my a–hole.
“I ended the show while the s–t [was] coming out,” she continued. “I got a standing ovation, they wanted an encore, [and] all I could do was back out of view through the curtains.”
The Emmy nominee was relieved to find “not one person” was backstage, so she dropped her pants in private.
She “squatted on the ground” behind the curtain “to alleviate the cramping,” leaving behind “orange oil” that “might have smelled like s–t.”
Cho pulled her pants back on — “too much evidence” if left behind, she noted — before jumping into her car as the audience “applauded and demanded an encore.”
Cho said, “As I drove away, I had a huge orange oil stain in the front seat of my car that I could not get out. I had to just get a new car.”
While she was “crying” at the time and felt “really upset and disgusted” over the “horrible” and “awful” experience, she also found herself “laughing” at the wild predicament.
Cho did not specify exactly when the incident took place, but dated it back to sometime in the Y2K era.
“I stopped taking the drugs at that point, but I went to other different methods of trying to lose weight after that,” she confirmed.
In 2020, Cho opened up to Page Six about the “really damaging” weight standards in Hollywood that left many women “scarred.”
Cho told us, “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.”
She spoke to The Guardian the following year about losing 30 pounds in two weeks through “diet and exercise and sheer terror” in 1994.
Cho subsequently went into kidney failure while on the set of “All-American Girl” and kept her hospitalization under wraps.
If you or someone you know is affected by any of the issues raised in this story, call the National Alliance for Eating Disorders at 866-662-1235.
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