Issa Rae says ‘mad’ ‘Insecure’ fans still ask her to ‘reshoot’ finale

The ending of Insecure left some fans feeling, well, insecure.

Issa Rae, the writer-slash-star of the HBO comedy series, which aired its final episode in 2021, has revealed that “people are really mad” about the way the show ended.

“People have told me to reshoot, which is crazy, because they didn’t like the decision that Issa makes in the end,” Rae said in a new interview with PEOPLE. 

The series’ fifth and final season concluded with Rae’s character (also named Issa) getting engaged to Lawrence (Jay Ellis), her on-and-off boyfriend, who inadvertently fathered a child with Condola (Christina Elmore) at the end of season 4. Although Issa patches up her friendship with her bestie Molly (Yvonne Orji) and winds up in a great spot professionally, many fans were dissatisfied with the finale because of the protagonist’s reunion with Lawrence.

Some fans detest the ending so strongly, in fact, that they demand more episodes to undo season 5’s finality. “I get asked for season 6 a lot — even this morning,” Rae said, noting that her social media accounts got hacked by phishers. “If you see crazy tweets for me, just know it’s not me [and I said], ‘Somebody, please help’ on my Insta Story. ‘I got hacked on Twitter.’ And somebody was like, ‘I’ll help you if you give me three more seasons of Insecure.'”

Rae reflected on the series finale in a conversation with Entertainment Weekly when the ep aired in Dec. 2021 — and revealed that even she didn’t want Issa and Lawrence to get together initially. “I did not think that they were going to end up together, and I was in the camp of feeling like I didn’t want Issa to end up with a man who had his first baby with someone else, because it was so tied to just my own views and as a writer too,” she said. 

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However, putting herself in her character’s shoes ultimately led her to a different conclusion. “Then as I started to become Issa Dee and started to shoot as her and live as her, I found myself wanting him and missing him and wanting that for her,” she explained. “I think we were both simultaneously on a journey to recognize that we could be happy together, and that last monologue that she ends up saying is so true to how I came around on wanting them to be together.”

In the same interview, Rae acknowledged that she and her co-writers left space to continue the Insecure characters’ stories. “In some ways, their lives are just getting started. Issa has this business that is thriving, and she’s in this relationship with Lawrence, and who knows whether or not she is helping him raise [his son] Elijah, that he’s a part of her life? That’s not the ending that she imagined, so navigating that is work,” she said. “These are stories that we can continue to tell in a sixth season, and that we’d be excited to tell.”

She then corrected herself, noting that imagining a sixth season allowed the writers to avoid the pressure of tying up every loose narrative end. “Actually, not necessarily excited to tell because the story is over,” Rae said. “But the point is that those are stories that could be told, and I think that that freed us in that way.”