Margaret Moran Cho (born December 5, 1968) is an American stand-up comedian, actress and musician. In her stand-up routines she critiques social and political problems, especially about race and sexuality. She starred in the ABC sitcom All-American Girl (1994–95).
As an actress, she has played such roles as Charlene Lee in It's My Party and John Travolta's FBI colleague in the action film Face/Off. Cho was part of the cast of the TV series Drop Dead Diva on Lifetime Television, in which she appeared as Teri Lee, a paralegal assistant. For her portrayal of Kim Jong Il on 30 Rock, she was nominated for the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Guest Actress in a Comedy Series in 2012.
In 2022, Cho co-starred in the film Fire Island, a portrayal of the LGBTQ Asian American experience on Fire Island.
Cho has worked in fashion and music and owns her own clothing line. She has frequently supported LGBTQ rights and has won awards for her humanitarian efforts on behalf of women, Asian Americans, and the LGBTQ community.
Cho was born in San Francisco on December 5, 1968, to a family of Korean descent. Her paternal grandfather Myung-sook Cho, a Christian minister, worked for the Japanese as a station master during their occupation of Korea. When Japan withdrew from Korea at the end of World War II, he was denounced as a chinilpa, a traitor, by North Korea and forced to move with his family, including his son, Margaret's father Seung-hoon Cho, to South Korea. During the Korean War, Myung-sook ran an orphanage in Seoul.
According to Margaret, she was raised in "a very Christian family." Cho grew up in a racially diverse neighborhood near the Ocean Beach section of San Francisco, which she described as a community of "old hippies, ex-druggies, burn-outs from the 1960s, drag queens, Chinese people and Koreans. To say it was a melting pot – that's the least of it. It was a really confusing, enlightening, wonderful time." Cho's parents, Young-Hie and Seung-Hoon Cho, ran Paperback Traffic, a bookstore on Castro Street in San Francisco. Her father writes joke books and a newspaper column published in Seoul, South Korea.
At school, Cho was bullied, saying that "I was hurt because I was different and so sharing my experience of being beaten and hated and called fat and queer and foreign and perverse and gluttonous and lazy and filthy and dishonest and yet all the while remaining invisible heals me, and heals others when they hear it – those who are suffering right now."
Cho has revealed sexual abuse in her past. Between the ages of five and twelve, she was "sexually molested by a family friend". On an episode of Loveline, she talked about being raped by her uncle while during the same time period he was raping his three-year-old daughter. She often skipped class and got bad grades in ninth and tenth grades, resulting in her expulsion from Lowell High School.
Cho has said she was "raped continuously through my youngest years" (by another acquaintance) and that, when she told someone else about it and her classmates found out, she received hostile remarks justifying it. She was accused of being "so fat" that only a crazy person would have sex with her.
After Cho expressed interest in performance, she auditioned and was accepted into the San Francisco School of the Arts, a San Francisco public high school for the arts. While at the school, she became involved with the school's improvisational comedy group alongside future actors Sam Rockwell and Aisha Tyler.
At age 15, she worked as a phone sex operator. She later worked as a dominatrix. After graduating from high school, Cho attended San Francisco State University, studying drama, but she did not graduate.
1992–1995: Early stand-up and All-American Girl
After doing several shows in a club adjacent to her parents' bookstore, Cho launched a stand-up comedy career and spent several years developing her material in clubs. Cho's career began to build after appearances on television and university campuses. In 1992, she appeared on the unsuccessful Golden Girls spin-off The Golden Palace in a small role. In 1993, Cho won the American Comedy Award for Best Female Comedian. In 2010, on The View, she discussed her nervousness about doing The Golden Palace and thanked Rue McClanahan posthumously for her help with rehearsing. She secured a coveted spot as opening act for Jerry Seinfeld; at about this time, she was featured on a Bob Hope special, and was a frequent visitor to The Arsenio Hall Show.
That same year, ABC developed and aired All-American Girl, a sitcom based on Cho's stand-up routine. Cho has expressed subsequent regret for much of what transpired during the production of the show. After network executives, especially executive producer Gail Berman, criticized her appearance and the roundness of her face, Cho starved herself for several weeks. Her rapid weight loss, done to modify her appearance by the time the pilot episode was filmed, caused kidney failure. The show suffered criticism from within the U.S. East Asian community over its perception of stereotyping. Producers told Cho at different times during production both that she was "too Asian" and that she was "not Asian enough." At one point during the course of the show, producers hired a coach to teach Cho how to "be more Asian." Much of the humor was broad and coarse, and at times, stereotypical portrayals of her close Korean relatives and gay bookshop customers were employed. The show was canceled after suffering poor ratings and the effect of major content changes over the course of its single season (19 episodes).
After the show's 1995 cancellation, Cho became addicted to drugs and alcohol. As detailed in her 2002 autobiography, I'm the One That I Want, in 1995, her substance abuse was evident during a performance in Monroe, Louisiana, where she was booed off the stage by 800 college students after going on the stage drunk.
1995–2002: Stand-up, acting, and writing
Though her career and personal life were challenging after the show's cancellation, Cho sobered up, refocused her energy, and developed new material. She hosted the New Year's Rockin' Eve 95 show with Steve Harvey. In 1997, she had a supporting role in the thriller film Face/Off starring Nicolas Cage and John Travolta, playing Wanda, one of the fellow FBI agents of Travolta's primary character.
In 1999, she wrote about her struggles with All-American Girl in her first one-woman show, I'm the One That I Want. That year, I'm the One That I Want won New York magazine's Performance of the Year award and was named one of the Great Performances of the year by Entertainment Weekly. At the same time, Cho wrote and published an autobiographical book with the same title, and the show itself was filmed and released as a concert film in 2000. Her material dealt with her difficulties breaking into show business because of her ethnicity and weight and her resulting struggle with and triumph over body image issues and drug and alcohol addiction. Cho appeared in an episode of Sex and the City's fourth season. The episode, titled "The Real Me", first aired on June 3, 2001, and also guest-starred Heidi Klum.