Finding her place — and moving on in. Jade Catta-Preta can’t wait to get back to work on The Soup, mostly because she loves her job. However, just like everyone else in the world, she had to hit pause in March.
“March 16, I think we were supposed to film our sixth episode. I was really getting in the groove. I was like, ‘Yeah! Nothing can stop us.’ And then, like, everything has. At first, we tried to do these little sips of Soup from our house,” the host, 36, says exclusively on the Thursday, July 30, episode of the “Watch With Us” podcast. “But unlike any other commentary show, it’s a scripted show. There is a lot of thought that’s being put into each clip and the things that I say. We want to kind of create a bigger universe, unlike all the older soups, so we decided to wait until we could get back into the studio.”
This week, the show’s second episode back aired and although she’s now speaking to an empty studio — “it’s kind of nice to feel that kind intimacy,” she admits — things are back to business as usual.
For Catta-Preta, the Soup gig was a dream job that she landed after 12 years of doing stand-up comedy in Los Angeles. However, it was important to her from the start that it not be a show about making fun of others.
“I’ve never been that kind of female comic that’s like, ‘I’m a female, and I do comedy!’ But you know, I view the world differently as a cis gender man. I’m open about my sexuality. I’m extremely open about my nationality. I wasn’t born and raised in America. So, I want the show to kind of be inclusive. I don’t really want to poke fun,” the Brazil native says. “That’s never really been my type of comedy where I kind of put people down. … I kind of want to like bring people up and I want people to feel included in the joke.”
Although she doesn’t really enjoy watching standup, the actress has done it long enough to know what to discuss and what’s off-limits, in her opinion.
“I really don’t like making people feel like s–t. Honestly, it’s never been my style. I remember watching comedy really early on, and every joke was, like, putting women down,” she says. “I kind of started to get drunk a little bit, and I heckled! Don’t tell any my comic friends. I can’t believe I’m saying this, but I just felt so unrepresented. I really, honestly did. It felt so uneven. Like every joke was always about the same kind of people being made fun of.”
For more from Catta-Preta and more exclusive TV news and interviews, subscribe to our “Watch With Us” podcast.
The Soup airs on E! Wednesdays at 10 p.m. ET.