Jess continued, “He was telling people to stay inside… I said you need to stay inside or something like that… Of course, I didn’t know anything about his cancer or anything like that… I riffed on him, and everybody thought it was funny and cool, even myself until he passed.”
However, Jess said she didn’t worry about what critics had to say about her because she had already condemned herself for her actions.
“I [didn’t even] care how people looked at me. How I looked at myself was crazy,” she added. “I was like, alright, I gotta change the way I move. For a minute, I didn’t want to do ‘Jess with the Mess’ no more because you don’t know what the hell people [are] going through, you don’t know when you come at somebody’s appearance… I just looked at him as a great actor. I deserve all of that. He was so unproblematic. That’s the only thing I regret.”
Three months after the joke controversy, Boseman tragically passed away at the age of 43 in August 2020. Little did the public know, the Black Panther actor had been privately battling colon cancer for four years.
