Comic's very frank podcast interview

Margaret Cho has opened up about substance abuse, becoming sober, escaping an abusive relationship and body shaming in a deeply personal interview.

The American comedian spoke to Elizabeth Day on her How to Fail podcast this week, and went into frank detail about many of the issues she’s experienced.

Speaking about getting clean, she explained: ‘My friends did an intervention also because I was living with a man who was incredibly abusive and very destructive and it was a terrible situation. 

‘I went to go do a film and he sent me a photograph of a bunch of pills in his hand and then turned off his phone. We lived in a couple different cities, so I wasn't sure what city to call emergency services to. I'm on the set of a film and trying to remember my lines and do stuff, but I was like, "Oh, okay, this guy's dead". 

‘Corinne Bailey Rae's husband had just died and I thought, "oh no, because then I'll be defined by this man's death and I will never be able to participate in public life again", as I've perceived that's what happened to her. I was just so scared that was going to happen to me. 

‘He would hold me hostage by threatening suicide and all this stuff and so I was just doing drugs and drinking. I'm trying to break up with him by dying. That was my solution. 

‘My friends who were so loving, so amazing, basically just kidnapped me and took me to a house and everybody was sitting there crying with letters and I knew the jig was up and they took me to a facility. 

‘I stayed in an institution for a couple of years also to hide from this guy. They were able to finally get rid of him. He had barricaded himself in my house and they had cut off the electricity and the water trying to get him out. He wouldn't leave and finally the police came in, guns drawn and they go into my bedroom and there was a mannequin of me with my clothes and my wig laying there and they thought, "Is this a dead body? Did he kill her? [...] Serial killer shit.’

She said she hadn’t seen the man since and that the intervention was as much about getting her away demo the abusive man as it was alcohol and drugs.

She said her experiences there were ‘great’ adding: ‘I really thrive in an institution. I'm meant to be hospitalised. I really love it. I think it's so fun. I think it's just beautiful. I was in there with a lot of famous people, who died. The most beautiful, talented, wealthy people in the world who had everything to live for, didn't make it. So I'm like, "oh, well I guess I should take this opportunity and live".

She explained that she started to abuse drugs and alcohol in her 30s and 50s to get over her eating disorder ‘which is not the way to do it’.

‘I had learned from another very famous actress that if you did a couple shots of tequila on an empty stomach, it would upset your stomach and then you wouldn't need to eat for the rest of the day. So that set me off on a little adventure of like, "OK, well why don't I just try this?"

‘When things were really bad. I got to a place where I didn't know if I was going to survive and didn't care. It was really bad. ‘

She took opiates which she said was ‘pain killer [that] doesn’t kill the pain. It kills your impetus to remove the pain, so you're just able to live with it. … I think that's the big lie of what opiates are. It's such a terrible thing to put in your system over and over.

‘Of course [some]  people need it to survive, but I was never using it to live. I was using it to die. ‘

She recalled one of her most troubling moments when she taken drugs and woken up ‘hanging from my shower curtain rod… hanging by my neck.

‘I had hung myself. I wasn’t even upset about anything. I hung myself in the middle of the night. I woke up hanging and then the shower curtain started bending, so I'm like, "oh shit. I'm too fat to kill myself. I should get down. I'll try again when I reach my goal weight". 

‘I don't even consider that a suicide attempt because I didn't even know I did it. That's so weird and I still don't know why… I didn't tell anybody that happened for years because if they find out they're going to make me stop drinking and doing drugs, and that's something that I cannot do. That's the one thing nobody's taking away from me.

‘You cannot take away the one thing in my life that makes it worth living, which it wasn't even worth living. It was like I just was trying to just stay afloat.’

Cho said the body-shaming happened when she was on the sitcom  All American Girl in the mid-1990s.

'It was really not very well received by critics,’ she said; "I got a lot of criticism for being too fat, which was not something that I had really thought about. I had always been fat, I just was, and I accepted that. But being a comedian, I thought it didn't matter. 

‘I was shocked to realise suddenly it did make a difference and that I had to lose a lot of weight. I became very focused on that and I started taking Fen-Phen, which was a 1990s diet drug that was like a speed and a downer at the same time. It's outlawed now because it killed people, but I loved it. I lost a lot of weight really quickly, but I became totally focused on losing weight. That became my goal rather than writing, rather than working on helping the writers.’

Cho played a version of herself on the show, which she called ‘ a huge mindfuck… that, you're too fat to be you’

The show was cancelled and replaced by Drew Carey, who Cho said was ‘very much allowed to be himself because he's a man and comedian.

‘The culture as it was then was incredibly toxic. You couldn't even live as a woman, as any woman. It was just so restrictive the way the beauty standard was. It wasn't just like about being white, it was about being so thin. Not even a healthy kind of thin.

After Fen-Phen was outlawed, Cho turned to modified foods and drugs to stop the absorption of fat – giving her constant diarrhoea.

‘I was taking all these weird drugs that would just make you shit,’ she said. And the consequences were sometimes very public: ‘ There was one time I was wearing all white at a show, and I was doing really well. I was almost at the end and I started to sh*t out. I couldn't control it. It was starting to come out because it was all oil, it was just grease. 

‘You remove the fat from your food, all that comes out is this, and it looked like pepperoni grease that you blot on top of a pizza. It’s just orange… So it started to stain. I know it was staining in the back of my dress. 

‘I just started spurting orange grease out of my asshole while I'm on stage and I ended the show while the shit is coming out. I got a standing ovation. They wanted an encore. All I could do was back up out of view and just back up through the curtains. I was in a theatre. I'm very fortunate about this. There was nobody backstage because the area was so small, so there was not even one person back there. I squatted on the ground and I let the rest of the oil out of my asshole just to alleviate the cramping.’

She then ran to her car and I drove away, adding: ‘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.’

Turning to the comedian’s childhood abuse, Day suggested whether there was part of  her that. ‘turned you into your own abuser because that felt familiar in some way’ – which Cho agreed with.

‘When you are raised in an environment of abuse, you find that familiar and actually comforting,’ she said. ‘That’s actually your normal. Then you end up seeking it for the rest of your life, even though you vow that you're not going to, it's insidious and it'll come in in areas that you don't expect.’ She did foe her that was eating a lot, although ‘it never got to the levels that it got until I started working in television and then became under this scrutiny that nobody can withstand. ‘

Asked for advice on anyone else going through the addiction or eating issues she experienced, Cho added: ‘There’s so much hope

‘First of all, get rid of the most difficult thing, whether that's disordered eating, whether it's undereating, overeating, try to get some clarity on food. We need food to live, but it can be abused and both over and under, it's really hard. It's about healing your relationship with food. It's very powerful, very important. 

‘With drugs and alcohol, you have to just remove that thing, remove what is killing you, and then find out why you want to drink and use drugs in the first place, and then you'll solve a lot of problems. It's not easy, but it's simple. If you just remove the one thing that's really, really making your life hard and then oversee what’s going on, don't be too overwhelmed by the problem, just try to remove that one thing and then it'll make things clear and you can move on. 

• The new episode of How to Fail with Elizabeth Day with Margaret Cho is available now.

 • For advice on addiction, visit Smart Recovery, or if you’re going through a tough time contact The Samaritans.

Published: 7 Jan 2026