Reality TV castmates Drew Sidora and Kandi Burruss of “The Real Housewives of Atlanta” sat down for some girl chat on Burruss’ YouTube series “Speak On It,” and during the tea session Sidora served it up piping hot when she spilled that rapper Nicki Minaj called out her post-baby body curves during an audition.
The 35-year-old actress was Kandi’s guest on her Dec. 13 episode of the online show, and shocked the host with a jaw-dropping story about the time she auditioned for Nicki Minaj’s partly autobiographical, then-in-development Freeform series, “Nicki.”
The question Kandi posed at 25:00 was innocent enough, so when Sidora segued into her tale of being put on blast for her post-baby weight by the multi-platinum rapper, the singer was visibly taken aback. “What have you been doing lately outside of the girls, when it’s just you, what are you working on? What’s going on?” she asked.
“Losing weight! TV and film adds a good 15 pounds,” replied “The Game” actress. “And I have gone in for roles and I have been told like ‘Girl! You don’t look how you looked in ‘TLC’.”
As soon as she saw Kandi’s expression, Sidora continued and went into detail about the experience. “So I was up for an ABC Family series. Nicki Minaj pilot. And Nicki herself said that,” she shared. “She said, I don’t look how I looked when I played T-Boz. I was like, ‘Nicki!’ It was like all these ABC execs around but I had gone through about five rounds and she really, really liked me…she said this in person, in front of all of those execs.”
Drew went on to explain that she’d given birth to her now-five-year-old son Machai just a few months before the audition. “It is what it is! I said ‘Look, I just had a baby. My baby in the car’ and at the time, I think my baby was like 3 months old but was literally still breastfeeding,” she continued.
The “Hindsight” actress appeared to take Minaj’s “constructive criticism” about not looking like her “CrazySexyCool: The TLC Story” character in stride, however. “What I took away was, ‘Girl, get your life together. Get back in the gym. You can’t keep blaming it on the baby, and get to work. So I took the real constructive criticism and some real advice. Like yeah I don’t look how I looked, yes I had a baby, let’s not body shame, but it did give me that energy that I needed to put into my health. Motivation.”
After the encounter, Sidora “turned it into lemonade” and started down her dedicated “journey of weight loss and just getting back to good health.”
Drew’s missing out on the role may have been a blessing in disguise. Nicki revealed during a 2016 interview with The Breakfast Club that the series was “postponed” since “creatively we wanted to make some changes with the pilot.” She added that “everyone involved … wants it to be perfect.”
