Michael Richards played an iconic character on one of the most-beloved sitcoms of all time. But for the last 18 years, he's been best known for something much different. The Seinfeld star sat down with ET's Nischelle Turner this week to open up about that infamous night at the Laugh Factory in November 2006, where he responded to a heckler with a racist tirade, going so far as to repeatedly yell, "He's a n****r! He's a n****r!" at the audience member.
"Trash talk, that's what I called it two days later, when I appeared on the Letterman show," he recounted. "Lot of trash talk -- two guys trying to pull each other down. But it's all my fault in that I let it get that way, you see? What does it mean, because I'm really yelling at myself in a sense, if I believe, and I do, that we're interconnected.
" "The work for me is to find out well, look, if I'm gonna get all upset because someone says I'm not funny late at night, what's going on with me? How insecure am I feeling in front of an audience for somebody to come at me with that kind of a heckle?" he continued. The incident flew under the radar for several days, until TMZ obtained cell phone video of Richards' tirade. Public backlash ensued, and Richards writes in his new memoir, Entrances and Exits , that he made the decision to "cancel himself" in the wake of the outburst.
"I took myself out. You don't need to take me out, I'll take myself out -- I'll save you the trouble," he said of his choice to step back from public life an.
