Jay Ellis feared he'd have to leave the country and hide over this week's Insecure

Variety

“Maybe I can be public enemy number two or three,” Ellis, who has yet to watch Sunday's episode, joked to Variety. “I remember first reading it during the table read and I was like, ‘This is gonna be rough,’” he added. “Like I might go to Mexico or Cuba or something and hide out for a few weeks after this episode because there’s some stuff that’s really hard to come back from.” Ellis admitted he was “a little terrified” to relive the emotional roller coaster captured on screen. In a separate interview with EW, Ellis added: "There was something that was also there for me of having this distance, which is so wild because when I go to work on Insecure, literally this entire time that I've gone to work on the show, outside of my stuff with Issa, I'm actually by myself. I don't ever really work with the girls, right? We pop into an episode every now and again together but I really don't spend that much time with the girls. So, in a lot of ways, the setup of them coming back together at the end of season 4 in a lot of ways was very reminiscent for me of them in episode 4, season 1. So, all of the sudden I was like, 'Oh, cool, I'm about to work with the homie again. We going to tell jokes all day long. It's going to be great,' and then it was like, 'Oh, no, I'm back by myself again.'"

ALSO:

• Christina Elmore says "Condola and I were one" in Sunday's episode because "I gave birth to my second child eight weeks before shooting that scene"
• Insecure writer Jason Lew says he wrote Sunday's episode from a "very raw" place