NEED TO KNOW
- Andy Richter opens up about his weight being the focal point of his career
- “It was galling to me,” he said about the comments he would receive when he first started working in Hollywood
- The Dancing with the Stars contestant previously discussed wanting to take weight-loss drugs, but said they were too expensive
Andy Richter wants the world to see him for more than his weight.
The 59-year-old actor and comedian got candid about his appearance being the butt of jokes for decades during the Tuesday, Nov. 4 episode of SiriusXM’s The Three Questions with Andy Richter podcast.
“One of my standard lines is, ‘I didn’t know there were so many ways to call someone fat,’” the comic, who is now competing on Dancing with the Stars, said. “‘Cherubic. Rotund.’ It was galling to me at the time.”
Richter’s road to fame began in 1993 when he became known as Conan O’Brien’s sidekick on Late Night with Conan O’Brien.
During a 2015 episode of the late night television show, the Madagascar actor accidentally broke a sofa he was sitting on, on live television while sitting beside guest Lauren Graham, who was in a different chair.
“You just broke the couch?” O’Brien, now 62, asked Richter. “You’ve been here 22 years. The couch has never broken.”
Richter said it wasn’t the first time that had happened to him on the show.
“No, I actually broke it once, but I didn’t notice it until [the] commercial,” the comedian claimed.
In Tuesday’s SiriusXM podcast episode, the actor said it would be nice to be recognized for his other traits.
“They say nothing about my right-handedness, about my Caucasian [ethnicity], about my blue eyes. They don’t say anything about my good, strong teeth, but they have to mention that,” Richter joked of the comments about his weight.
Earlier this year, the Dancing with the Stars contestant shared that he considered using weight-loss medication, but told Modern Family alum Eric Stonestreet that his insurance won’t cover the drugs.
“I actually have investigated getting on some of these types of drugs,” Richter told Stonestreet on the May 6 episode of his The Three Questions podcast while discussing GLP-1 weight-loss injections.
“I’m not diabetic, I’m not pre-diabetic but I obviously have weight to lose and I have sleep apnea, which could or couldn’t be — I’m sure being overweight doesn’t help with sleep apnea,” he said.
The Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby actor then shared what was stopping him from trying the medication.
“I’ve investigated it and it’s just, it’s cost-prohibitive to me at this point,” he said. “They’re so expensive. And my insurance is not covering them.”
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More recently, Richter credited DWTS with helping him spend more time moving his body.
“I didn’t want to do it,” he said of joining the celebrity competition show while on the Conan O’Brien Needs a Friend podcast in September. “But then I thought, ‘No, I need to do this. I need to do this just to get moving.’ And it got me to go to the gym and do cardio, which I loathe. I started to do a lot more stretching to prepare myself.”
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