Emily Hampshire believes supporting the LGBTQ+ community is more important now than ever, and Celebrity Jeopardy!was the perfect platform to amplify her message.
Celebrity Jeopardy! gives stars the ability to compete and to win money for a charity of their choice. Hampshire recently played on behalf of LGBTQ+ advocacy group, GLAAD, a media monitoring organization.
"To be able to play for GLAAD on the Jeopardy! stage — that's that's a huge audience. That was enough for me," she tells Tracy E. Gilchrist of Equal Entertainment.
Emily Hampshire on her 'Celebrity Jeopardy!' appearance
Hampshire shares that she picked the organization because "it ensures that [LGBTQ+ people] get a fair, inclusive representation." In a year with an unprecedented amount of anti-LGBTQ+ legislation being proposed and enacted, the actor says now is "the most important time there's ever been" to take a stand.
"There's so much misinformation out there. Right now, I think it is life and death for a lot of LGBTQ+ people," Hampshire explains. "And what I love about GLAAD is that it's an advocate organization and it represents LGBTQ+ people in the media."
The preparation required to be on
Jeopardy! was particularly arduous for Hampshire, who is Canadian. She notes that she took the time to learn "all the presidents and all the states" before her appearance.
"I really learned more in that month than I have in my entire life of schooling," she says. "I was also educated in Canada and in Montreal, so half of that was in French. So, geography to me is all in French."
As she grew up in Toronto before moving to Los Angeles, Hampshire says that she has usually been in areas where LGBTQ+ acceptance was simply "normal," though she notes that "is not in the rest of the world necessarily." She hopes that championing a queer organization on a show as big as Jeopardy! will promote inclusivity on a larger scale.
"I do think that representation is everything, and even more so on that platform, that stage, that Jeopardy! is," she continues. "Jeopardy! is a place where it's such a vast audience, that there's nowhere better I could have thought of for that."
For more interviews like this, watch Equal Entertainmenton The Advocate Channel.
