Issa Rae revealed that Nipsey Hussle encouraged her to make amends with Lauren London after a misunderstanding over Awkward Black Girl.
Leading up to the revelation, the Insecure actress has disclosed on multiple occasions that a TV executive suggested she replace herself with a light-skinned Black woman in a cable version of the hit web series Awkward Black Girl, which she both created and starred in.
While talking about the ordeal, including within the Awkward Black Girl memoir, Rae would name London as an actress that was proposed to her — something the ATL actress wasn't fond of.
A passage from Awkward Black Girl reads that executives suggested, as Rae referred to her, "actress/video girl/Lil Wayne’s baby’s mother, Lauren London."
This appeared to have caused a rift between the two entertainers, which the late rapper would later help resolve.
“He was like, ‘You should just talk to her. Let me set it up,’” Rae recalled about the late rapper during her cover interview with Vanity Fair. “It actually sparked an amazing two-hour conversation.”
She shared that naming the ATL star as a substitute was one of her "biggest regrets."
In the aftermath, Rae said that the late rapper helped arrange a reconciliation between her and London, who was the "Grinding All My Life" artist's life partner, at a birthday party for Diddy.
“We had so much in common,” she continued. “She was like, ‘People don’t understand, I’m an awkward Black girl.’ In the same way that I was upset about the limited portrayal of Black women, she was like, ‘People do the same thing to me.’ I completely get that.”
Born Ermias Joseph Asghedom, the rapper was gunned down at 33 years old in a Los Angeles neighborhood in 2019, a neighborhood that both Rae and the rapper grew up in, as Blavity previously reported.
“For him to invest so much, to be of the community and then to be gunned down in that same area is just heartbreaking,” she told Buzzfeed’s Profile in the wake of his death.
“It’s just sad that his life was taken away,” she said. “A sense of hope was taken away, a sense of promise was taken away and that’s just a tragedy.”
The actress also shared in her recent interview that now, she’s working on a myriad of projects, but refuses to write and star in a series ever again.
“I’m never doing this again,” she said, referencing her experience on Insecure, which is slated to end this year after its fifth season. “I told myself I would never write and be in a show that I created again. It takes up a lot of your life, and I like to do a lot of things.”
While Insecure has allowed Rae to redefine archetypes of Black women, she expressed how grateful she is to have been a part of a project that people believed in.
“Prentice and I are so grateful that HBO believed in our show from the beginning and kept faith in us to see our vision through the end,” Rae told Deadline of the comedy she executive produces with Prentice Penny.
“We always planned to tell this story through five seasons, but we couldn’t have made it this far without the tremendous support of our audience,” she said.
But as the phrase states, when one door closes, another one opens. Some of Rae’s upcoming ventures include a docuseries entitled Sweet Life, which focuses on Black L.A. residents in their 20s and is inspired by the 2007 BET series Baldwin Hills.
The multi-hyphenate is also producing an adaptation of Nice White Parents, a podcast about a public school in Brooklyn alongside Adam McKay. And the Emmy-nominated series A Black Lady Sketch Show, which Rae executive produces, also got renewed for its second season.
