Melissa McCarthy opens up to Henry Louis Gates Jr. about discovering her family’s history in this EXCLUSIVE preview of the all-new episode of ‘Finding Your Roots.’
“I guess I’ve always thought, ‘Oh, maybe there’s no roots. Maybe there was no real family. People just kind of moved and scattered,’” Melissa McCarthy says in our EXCLUSIVE preview of Finding Your Roots. “And so that’s why I don’t know my history, but to find out the history was really solid in one spot, which to me means, you know, you stayed together. There was a community. There was a family. It stayed generation after generation.”
Melissa admits that it gives her a “sense of comfort that we weren’t all over the place. We stayed with our family.” The actress notes that she’s “so close” to her family and loves to “huddle” them all together. After learning her family’s history, she wonders if that part of her was passed on through generations.
Season 6 of Finding Your Roots premiered Oct. 8. The new season will span from Oct. 2019 to Oct. 2020 with two new episodes premiering in Oct. 2019, 8 episodes in Jan. 2020, and 6 episodes in Oct. 2020.
The new episodes will feature both new guests and re-mixed thematic combinations of former participants’ stories. The celebrities featured this season include Jordan Peele, Issa Rae, Justina Machado, Sasheer Zamata, Isabella Rossellini, Anjelica Huston, Gayle King, Nancy Pelosi, RuPaul, Zac Posen, Terry Gross, Marc Maron, Jeff Goldblum, Eric Stonestreet, Queen Latifah, Jeffrey Wright, Sigourney Weaver, Amy Ryan, Sterling K. Brown, Jon Batiste, Diane von Furstenberg, and more. Finding Your Roots airs Tuesdays at 8 p.m. on PBS.