Uzo Aduba: ‘I was still thinking about quitting acting even when I was cast in Orange is the New Black'

Telegraph

21-03-2025

'I've got my binoculars right here! Aren't they cute?' bubbles Uzo Aduba. The 44-year-old actor – best known for her double Emmy-winning breakthrough role as Crazy Eyes in comedy drama Orange is the New Black – admits that before being cast as ace detective Cordelia Cupp in new Netflix comic crime caper, The Residence, it had 'never even occurred to me to go birdwatching.'
But Cupp is a sleuth who honed her beady-eyed observational skills and long-game attention span with a birdspotter's guide in her hand. So Aduba headed out into the field with her book'n'bins and 'really surprised myself by enjoying it. It's so peaceful and quiet. It calms the mind. You become very detail-oriented. So many birds LOOK alike. But if you pay attention to the nuances you see they have very different behavioural traits that distinguish them from each other.'
Cordelia Cupp is certainly faced by birds of very similar feathers when she arrives at the crime scene in The Residence. As a 'consulting detective' – in the tradition of Sherlock Holmes and Miss Marple – Cupp is drafted in by the Washington Police Department to solve a murder that has been committed during a state banquet (designed to cool escalating tensions between the US and Australia) at The White House. As a black woman in tweed, she's confronted by a large flock of white men in penguin suits ('How many dudes do you need?!'). There's extra fun to be had with the Australian delegation including celebrities Hugh Jackman and Kylie Minogue, who ends up having to sing for her supper, before being interviewed as a suspect. 'She was great,' says Aduba. 'I'd forgotten she was a good actor.'
The Residence is the latest in a long line of witty, and wildly entertaining TV shows to come from Shonda Rhimes ' Shondaland production stable, founded in 2005 to bring us medical dramas such as Grey's Anatomy and Private Practice before branching out across all forms of entertainment. Increasingly, Shondaland shows such as Scandal, Bridgerton and Queen Charlotte have cast ethnically diverse actors in traditionally white-only genres. In this case, a woman of proud Nigerian heritage solving a classic country house murder.
'The success of those shows, and their impact on the television landscape over the past 12 to 14 years has proved there's an appetite for versatility in storytelling,' says Aduba. Does she think the Shondaland project is typical of the entertainment industry's pushback against President Trump's diversity equity, and inclusion (DEI) dismantling policies? 'Pushback from entertainment, or from the culture in general?' she mulls. 'People can – with all their might – try to stop progress. However, history has shown us that progress can be slowed but it cannot be stopped. Shonda Rimes has brilliantly cast shows that expand our idea of who gets to tell stories. That's the good trouble she's been making for over a decade. And that – in the words of Forrest Gump – is all I have to say about that.'
Pivoting tactfully from my questions about the Trump administration she notes that Shondaland shows 'always bring the unexpected. She will take whatever you think you know about the locations she uses – stately homes, hospitals, law courts or Washington DC – and turn your preconceptions on their head.' In the case of The Residence, cameras sneak behind the scenes and below stairs at the fictional White House to explore tensions between the permanent staff to see how rivalries are ruffled by changes of administration. These managers, chefs, gardeners, florists, carpenters and social secretaries are all ambitious people at the top of their game, often pushing competing agendas. Some want to modernise, others cling to tradition.
'When we think of the White House, we think of a very particular, public-facing set of people,' says Aduba. 'But, behind the scenes, these other set of people are always there as historical keepers of the keys. I thought it was very interesting to hold the binoculars up to the politics WITHIN the house.'
Talking via video link from the New York home she shares with filmmaker husband Robert Sweeting and their one-year-old daughter, Aduba is a merry – but careful – conversationalist. She's dressed casually in sweatshirt and red baseball cap emblazoned with the name of her alma mater, Boston University. She's glowing with cosy domesticity, saying that she'd been through her fair share of 'heartbreak and rejection' before finding love and becoming a mother for the first time in her forties. 'All the waiting, all that pressure-cooking was worth it,' she says. Her daughter's Igbo name – Adaiba Lee Nonyem – means 'daughter of the people, treasurer of the mother's names who came before you'.
In her 2024 memoir, The Road is Good: How a Mother's Strength became a Daughter's Purpose, Aduba explained that her own name – Uzoamaka – means that the journey may be hard but the destination is worth it. Written while her own mother, Nonyem, was dying of pancreatic cancer, it's a moving chronicle of the immigrant experience. Today Aduba holds up a framed photograph of her mother – beaming through a froth of extravagant jet frills and gold jewellery – to honour the grit of a woman who had two masters degrees (both with distinction) but wasn't too proud to work at McDonalds to support her five children. As a child, the clever but sometimes reckless Aduba never troubled her mother with the occasional racism she faced in the mostly white suburban New England.
She credits her Nigerian-born refugee mother with giving her the tenacity to battle on through repeated rejections as she fought to make a career as an actor. 'She held us firm.' Although she had actually resolved to quit the industry when she was then cast, aged 31, as fearless, Shakespeare-quoting loner Suzanne 'Crazy Eyes' Warren in prison drama Orange is the New Black. 'Even then I wasn't initially brought on as a series regular. I didn't think: 'This is the part that is going to change things for me'. It wasn't as though I got the job and the internal quitting voice went away. I was more: 'Hmm, let's see how this plays through. Maybe it is going to be okay…''
The Huffington Post's critic wrote that Aduba was 'genuinely frightening' in the role which initially saw her struggling with obsessive, unrequited love for another inmate – going so far as to urinate on the other woman's cell floor when she's rejected. Having initially been drafted in for a few episodes, Aduba made the character so compelling she became pivotal to the show for all six seasons. She would become one of only two actors to ever win Emmy Awards in both comedy (2014) and drama (2015) for the same role.
From there Aduba went on to star in 2020 Hulu miniseries Mrs America as politician Shirley Chisholm opposite Cate Blanchett and Sarah Paulson; as a therapist in the fourth season of HBO's In Treatment (also 2020) and was nominated for a Tony Award for her Broadway turn as the lead character in Lyn Nottage's 2023 play, Clyde's, in which she swaggered about as the owner of a truck stop cafe relentlessly bullying and belittling her employees. Speaking now to the cheery, soft-hearted actor, I'm surprised that she's been repeatedly cast in some hardened, menacing roles. But she's an actor who clings to the humanity of even the most difficult character – so with Warren she 'leaned into the love story'. Cordelia Cupp is equally uncompromising – if more rigorously law and order.
'Cordelia Cupp is not part of the system,' nods Aduba. 'She moves through the world as she chooses. Whatever you think about her could be wrong – she undresses herself, as it were, over the course of the season, until you get to see how she became the greatest detective in the world.' Was the role written for Aduba? 'I honestly don't know the answer to that question,' she shrugs. 'You'd have to ask [scriptwriter] Paul William Davies. But I know that it felt like… like I had a connection. I could see a pathway into this woman which felt exciting.'
The Residence also allows Aduba to nod heavenwards at her late mother. She says she channels a little of Angela Lansbury in her mother's favourite Eighties show, Murder, She Wrote. 'That was her jam,' she grins. 'When my daughter was born I remember asking myself, 'How am I going to raise her without the guidance of the woman who raised me?' But every day I realise how much of her is in me. I had never heard my mother's disciplinarian, 'No, no, noooo!' come out of my mouth until my daughter was born.' She shrugs sadly then smiles. 'But she is unmoveably in me as I move more deeply into my womanhood. From the gap between my front teeth, to my name, from my nose to my lips – all of it.'