Amy Schumer has said she received death threats for a joke she made at the Oscars.
The comedian, who co-hosted this year’s Academy Awards ceremony with Wanda Sykes and Regina Hall, revealed on The Howard Stern Show (per The Guardian) that she’d received a number of threats.
Schumer had pretended to mistake Kirsten Dunst, nominated for her performance in The Power in the Dog, for a seat-filler, who is a person hired to sit in a guest’s chair if they briefly leave the room.
Fans of Dunst and her husband Jesse Plemons, who engaged with Schumer after the joke, took aim at Schumer on social media. She then said in a statement on Twitter: “Hey I appreciate the love for Kirsten Dunst. I love her, too! Wouldn’t disrespect that queen like that.”
The comedian has since explained that the statement was necessary as the abuse she was receiving had begun to spiral.
“They were so bad the secret service reached out to me,” Schumer told Stern. “I was like, ‘I think you have the wrong number. It’s Amy, not Will [Smith].’ The misogyny is unbelievable.”
She also responded to comments people made after she said she was “triggered and traumatised” after Will Smith slapped Chris Rock on stage.
“People made fun of me for saying it was traumatising,” Schumer said. “I don’t think it was traumatising for me. I think it was traumatising for all of us.”
Elsewhere, Amy Schumer revealed she had been asked to cut a joke about Alec Baldwin and the shooting on the Rust set in which cinematographer Halyna Hutchins was killed.
“Don’t Look Up is the name of a movie? More like don’t look down the barrel of Alec Baldwin’s shotgun,” Schumer said. “I wasn’t allowed to say any of that [at the Oscars], but you can just come up and [slap] someone.”
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