Amanda Seales responded to being left off the “Insecure” 10th anniversary tour by filming herself in the Netflix documentary format, sitting down in the interview chair with the caption identifying it as the Tiffany DuBois doc about not being on the tour, and delivering one line: “It’s fine, it’s fine.” That is the whole video. No monologue, no thread, no follow up post explaining what she meant. Just the chair, the setup, and a woman saying the thing that everybody says when it is not fine.
The trend she used has been running for months now, where people mimic the visual language of a streaming true crime doc to talk about something small. Her situation has been narrated by other people for years, usually unkindly, and this is the first time she has framed it herself in a way that lets the audience laugh with her instead of at her.
The tour is real and she is genuinely not on it. Issa Rae and showrunner Prentice Penny announced “Insecure: The 10th Anniversary Tour” on July 14, a 13 date run opening September 10 at The Met in Philadelphia and closing October 8 at YouTube Theater in Inglewood. In between it hits Washington DC, Detroit, Boston, Brooklyn, Montclair, Las Vegas, Oakland, Chicago, Atlanta, Irving, and Houston. The pitch is candid conversation, untold stories, and behind the scenes moments from the five seasons that ran on HBO from 2016 to 2021. Yvonne Orji, Jay Ellis, and Natasha Rothwell are billed as appearing on select dates. It runs alongside “BLOCC PARTY,” the anniversary podcast Rae and Penny launched earlier this year.
It is a live conversation tour hosted by Rae and Penny, not a full cast reunion special, and the three cast members attached are guests on some dates rather than fixtures on all of them.
None of this started last week. The break traces to Emmys weekend in 2019, when Seales says she was turned away from a party organized by Rae’s longtime publicist Vanessa Anderson despite having been invited by Jesse Williams, and was escorted out by security in front of a room full of people she worked with. She has said the part that hurt was not the door, it was that nobody inside moved. She raised it with Rae, and by her account was told it was between her and Anderson. She said she was iced out on set afterward, that she had tried for years to build something with the women on that cast, that she invited them to her house and they did not come, that she bought gifts and got a thank you, that she tried to organize a retreat and got a no.
She laid all of it out again on “Club Shay Shay” in April 2024, and pushed back hard on the version of events where she is the difficult one. Her position has been consistent, which is that a false narrative about her behavior on that set got repeated until it became the accepted story, and that Rae had the standing to correct it and did not. Rae has largely not engaged publicly, which has left the whole thing sitting as one person’s account against silence. Amanda Seales has also said the incident nearly pushed her out of acting entirely.
Oh well….
