It took comedian and actress Gina Yashere’s house burning down in the L.A. fires to make her decide to leave, at least for now, the America she longed to get to as a child growing up in the East End of London.
“I’ve left. The universe gave me a good kick, ‘you need to get out of America,’ by burning down my house in Altadena,” the Bob Hearts Abishola co-creator and star tells The Hollywood Reporter at the Just For Laughs comedy festival in Montreal.
Yashere’s home in a Black community in Altadena, just west of downtown Los Angeles, was destroyed in the Eaton fire that started on Jan. 7. She recalls getting the tragic news while in Costa Rica, where she has a second home.
“I had a list of things to save if there’s a fire encroaching, what to grab. And I wasn’t able to save them because I wasn’t there when it happened. So I lost some of my most treasured items,” she adds, like her comedy notebooks and club date posters and media reviews.
And any hope of a return to rebuild her Altadena home was thwarted by her home insurance being canceled, even as she still owns the plot of land. So Yashere is dividing her time between Costa Rica and Toronto, where she lives for six months of the year while starring in Star Trek: Starfleet Academy as an Academy instructor.
“So I’m kind of out of America because, yeah, I’m a citizen, but I’m still a dark-skinned woman with an accent, and they’re snatching people off the streets,” she explains. That’s quite a reversal for the British-born comic by way of Nigeria who left for America in the hope of better opportunity in sunny Los Angeles amid the palm trees and swimming pools she saw in American TV shows and movies growing up.
“I went straight to L.A. because I wanted that Melrose Place lifestyle,” Yashere recalls. But the climb to the top in Hollywood took far longer and was far harder than first envisioned. “We don’t care how famous you are in England. You’re not a draw here and only the headliners really get paid. The rest of you pretty much get nothing,” she recounted of attitudes among comedy club bookers and owners in her early years in Los Angeles.
But a feisty Yashere sat quietly in the back of clubs with her ears pricked up to hear of a slot opening up, if a comic was late or canceled, so she could get on stage to show her stuff, if only for 10 minutes. And she handed out flyers in front of clubs where she was performing and did endless publicity for her first comedy special, Laughing to America, which was shot in San Francisco.
“I still felt I was going to get more opportunities here (in America). I just had to worker harder to get those opportunities,” Yashere recounts. Other gigs opened up, including a second comedy special, Gina Yashere: Ticking Boxes and becoming a British correspondent on The Daily Show.
But her big break came in 2019 when Chuck Lorre tapped Yashere to help create and eventually showrun the CBS sitcom Bob Hearts Abishola, where she also co-starred as Abishola’s best friend, Kemi.
“He changed my life. I was doing specials, I was doing shows, I was starting to bubble along very nicely. But I tried to sell shows, but nobody wanted them. And Chuck was, ‘You know what? I like this girl. I want her to help me with this project.’ And he basically anointed me,” Yashere insists.
The Bob Hearts Abishola series ran for five seasons until 2024, mostly under Yashere’s leadership as Lorre gave the veteran stand-up performer creative rein to bring the laughs. “We’d send him (Lorre) the scripts and he’d go, ‘Yeah, like this. I don’t like that. Change that, yeah.’ But he trusted my vision as a showrunner. I have that same ear because I’m a stand-up. I’ve a live performer. I know where the funny is,” Yashere says.
As work in Los Angeles becomes harder to find these days with major studios and streamers increasingly filming elsewhere, Yashere managed to land a new gig on the Star Trek series in Toronto.
Now, as Yashere enjoys respect and a solid foothold on the Hollywood ladder, she just needs to drop firmer roots away from TV sets and stand-up comedy stages after the L.A. fires. “So it’s been a smooth ride for me, apart from my house burning down and me losing everything,” she sighs.