Tracee Ellis Ross Calls Out Jay Leno’s ‘Tonight Show’ Turning Her Down: ‘Is It Just Racism?’

Recent “Headlines” about The Tonight Show With Jay Leno aren’t favorable, now that Tracee Ellis Ross has said she was snubbed from the NBC late-night talk show.

Ross shared the anecdote on Trevor Noah’s podcast What Now? as she and Noah discussed the lack of industry respect for the 2000s-era sitcom Girlfriends, on which she starred as Joan Clayton.

“No talk shows. No Tonight Show, no David Letterman, no Emmys. Had never been to the Emmys.”

“As a matter of fact, I have a story. It was Jay Leno. And I had Girlfriends, and the comment was, ‘We love Tracee. Call us when she gets something.’ And I was like, I remember thinking, ‘Get what? What else do you have to get?’ I don’t know. And it just was … ‘We love her,’ but it was not considered.”

Ross did say, however, that she remembered seeing Leno’s Tonight Show having Tony Shalhoub on to promote Monk, and she added that TV show had a quarter of the audience that Girlfriends had.

“And I remember seeing him on the show, and I was so confused. And I was like, ‘I don’t understand. Is it viewership?’” she said. “And the only thing you can boil it down to, you’re like, ‘Is it just racism?’ Like, I’m not sure how to — like, how do you categorize it? Like, I don’t know what it is.”

Ross recalled the same slight in 2023, when she explained to Variety how winning a Golden Globe Award for her performance in Black-ish changed the trajectory of her career.

“I had never been to the Emmys. I’d never been to the Golden Globes. I couldn’t get on a late night talk show,” she said at the time. “I remember when I was on Girlfriends, Jay Leno’s talent person saying to my publicist, ‘We love Tracee. Call us when she gets a role that we care about.’ So that was my experience in the industry. The industry was a lot more segregated at the time. So winning the Golden Globe, from an ego perspective, it’s like ‘Blah, blah, blah, really great.’ But winning is a marker for the industry. It changes something about how you are seen, particularly as a person of color in this industry, and how you are paid.”