When the classic sitcom Roseanne returned to television earlier this year, comedian Wanda Sykes was hired as a consulting producer on the show. However, when series star Roseanne Barr made a racist tweet in May, Sykes immediately quit the series. Later that same day, ABC announced that it was canceling Roseanne completely.
In a new interview with the Guardian , the 54-year-old entertainer has admitted that she would “love” to have a conversation with Barr today.
Back when everything was going down, Barr blamed Sykes’ exit from the series as one of the reasons why the network decided to give the show the ax. “Her tweet made ABC very nervous and they cancelled the show,” she wrote on Twitter on May 30.
Sykes told the Guardian that the whole situation is “very unfortunate” and said she has not talked to Barr since prior to the day she made the infamous career-ending tweet. However, she did admit that she “would love to” have a conversation with her former coworker.
“[Roseanne has] some mental issues — she’s said so herself — and I think for anyone with mental issues, social media is not the place you should be. I was telling my producing partner, ‘We have to get her off social media — this is nuts,’” explained Sykes.
As television viewers now know, all of the other cast members from Roseanne currently star in its spinoff, The Conners , which airs Tuesday nights on ABC. Neither Barr nor Sykes was asked to be part of the series.
Sykes — who shares two children, 9-year-old fraternal twins Olivia and Lucas, with her wife Alex Niedbalski — is way too busy with other projects to worry about that though.
The Virginia native is again focusing on her stand-up comedy career, which began in the late 1980s. She has tour dates lined up in the United States, the United Kingdom, Belgium, the Netherlands, and Grand Cayman island through April of 2019, and she will be starring in her fifth stand-up special — to be broadcast on Netflix — in 2019.
On television, Sykes has a recurring role on Black-ish , and she has three films in the can. In the animated movie UglyDolls , due in theaters on May 10, 2019, she provides the voice of one of the characters, Wage; she stars in Friendsgiving with Malin Akerman, Kat Dennings, Jane Seymour, Aisha Tyler, and Margaret Cho; and appears in The Wedding Year with Sarah Hyland, Tyler James Williams, Anna Camp, and Jenna Dewan.
