Latest news with #CordeliaCupp
Axios
25-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Axios
Things to do in Metro Detroit: April 25-27
🍵 Calling all matcha-loving creators! La Ventana Cafe is hosting a mixer for content creators, photographers, entrepreneurs and others, themed around matcha. Sunday, 12-3pm. $10. 💵 Join a financial empowerment event at the Detroit Hispanic Development Corp. in Corktown. Learn about finances and entrepreneurship, shop small businesses and chat with nonprofits. Saturday, 1-4pm. Free! 🐦 Seeking the know-how to become a birding aficionado like Cordelia Cupp? Now's your chance. Join guided instructional walks with the Detroit Bird Alliance, starting this weekend. Saturday, 8:30-11am, plus subsequent Saturdays through May 31. $66. 🎶 Dance through sets of rising local DJs mixing R&B, hip-hop, dance music and more with HousePartyDetroit at Spot Lite. Friday, 9pm-2am. $10-$20. 🌎 Didn't get a chance to celebrate Earth Day this week? Join a climate rally in downtown Royal Oak, followed by an eco-friendly fair at the Royal Oak Farmers Market. Saturday, 3-7pm. Free to enter. 👚 Change out old for new (new to you, at least) at the ReVamp Clothing Swap Festival at the Jam Handy. Bring old clothing, shoes and accessories and get clothing. Plus, there's also a plant seed swap and a fashion show. Saturday, 12-5pm. $25 to participate. 🍸 Find some respite at Miss Eva's speakeasy nights, featuring spoken word icon Ursula Rucker and hosted by Detroit poet laureate jessica Care moore. Saturday, with doors opening at 7pm and show at 9pm. $15 in advance, $20 at the door. 🦖 The only thing better than dinosaurs is dinosaurs with music. Check out a local parody production, " Jurassic Park: The Musical," starting this weekend.
Washington Post
13-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Washington Post
Yes, all that stuff about birds on ‘The Residence' is true
Netflix's new miniseries 'The Residence' features many of the hallmarks of other Shondaland productions: recognizable actors, quips, scandal, trysts, murder, mystery. It also has something a bit unusual for a Shondaland show, or really any show: a lot of bird talk. When Detective Cordelia Cupp (Uzo Aduba) is called to the White House to investigate the death of a staff member, her first thoughts are not about the crime but about birds. 'Teddy Roosevelt was already known as a prominent birder before he became president,' she says, adding that Roosevelt kept a journal of all the birds he saw on the White House grounds as president and that she's already seen a screech owl and a purple grackle.
NBC News
25-03-2025
- Entertainment
- NBC News
Uzo Aduba leads White House mystery series 'The Residence'
One of TV's most prolific producers, Shonda Rhimes, is back at the White House, but this time without 'Scandal' and Olivia Pope. That doesn't mean the drama has stopped. It's just wrapped in a lot of wit and humor. There's been a murder at the White House and eccentric detective Cordelia Cupp is on the job to figure out whodunit in the eight-episode Netflix series 'The Residence,' starring three-time Emmy winner Uzo Aduba. Cordelia Cupp arrives at the White House tasked with solving whether chief usher A.B. Wynter (an impactful Giancarlo Esposito who stepped in for the late Andre Braugher) killed himself or was murdered during a state dinner. The investigation reveals the intricate inner workings of the White House from its head chef to its janitors. Aduba told NBC News that she appreciated her character's sharp mind. 'I love her precision,' she said during the 2025 SCAD TV Festival in Atlanta. 'I love how she doesn't miss a beat. She's really exacting with her words. I think she's just smart. She sees every detail in the room and is able to put together all the necessary pieces to solve the case.' Cupp incorporates another passion into her detective work: 'She's a bird-watcher,' Aduba said. 'She brings all of herself, including bird-watching, to her cases,' she added. Throughout the series, the ace detective is rarely caught without her binoculars and is prone to bird-watching as she interrogates. The cast of actors includes 'This Is Us' star Susan Kelechi Watson as Jasmine, who had dreamed of replacing A.B. Wynter. 'Saturday Night Live' alum Jane Curtain plays the president's mother-in-law, while Bronson Pinchot, from the 'Beverly Hills Cop' franchise, is Chef Didier Gothard. Randall Park, from 'Fresh Off the Boat,' plays skeptical FBI agent Edwin Park working alongside Cupp to solve the mystery. 'The Wire' alumni Edwina Findley and Isiah Whitlock, Jr., play boozy White House butler/server and Metropolitan Police Department chief respectively. Comedian and former Minnesota Sen. Al Franken plays a senator leading an investigation into security failings at the White House. Even pop star Kylie Minogue is in the mix. Aduba said Cupp's ability to sift through more than 150 murder suspects and a string of confusing clues comes naturally to her character. 'She has absolute confidence in herself and her abilities, and will not allow anyone's idea of who she is or what she can do be the dominating factor in defining who she is,' she said. Being the best at what she does, however, is not what motivates Cordelia Cupp. 'I think Cordelia is definitely driven by the truth,' Aduba said in a Zoom interview. 'She wants to get the answer. She wants to get to the root. So she'll do whatever needs to be done to chase that down. And she loves, once she has done that, having everything explained in some way. That helps to make the world make sense.' Aduba said taking on the lead for 'The Residence' was a fulfilling job, especially under Rhimes' 'warm and supportive' Shondaland banner. 'You can feel that from Shonda herself,' Aduba said. 'She does the good work, also.' She added that Rhimes buoys everybody up. 'I know it is not by accident that they have found that success, because they operate with discipline and their modus operandi is one of excellence that continually sets the bar for the industry.'
Telegraph
21-03-2025
- Entertainment
- Telegraph
Uzo Aduba: ‘I was still thinking about quitting acting even when I was cast in Orange is the New Black'
'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.'
Chicago Tribune
20-03-2025
- Entertainment
- Chicago Tribune
‘The Residence' review: A comedic whodunint … at the White House?
When a White House employee is found dead on the premises during a state dinner, Cordelia Cupp, a consulting detective for the police, is called in to find out who done it in the Netflix series 'The Residence.' The series comes from Paul William Davies, whose credits include the soapy Shonda Rhimes drama 'Scandal' about White House power players and the fixer tasked with keeping their secrets hidden. It probably wasn't a leap for Davies (or Rhimes, who is an executive producer here) to wonder if that setting would work as the backdrop for a comedic murder mystery. Considering the real-world state of affairs at the moment, I don't know what to do with the cognitive dissonance of a concept that envisions the White House as a neutral location for a breezy, deeply nonpolitical TV series. Just go with it, I guess? But at least Davies has done something increasingly rare. Instead of putting wielders of influence at the story's center, he's refocused his attention — and therefore ours — to the people who labor in the background tasked with the upkeep and cleaning of the building itself. He's drawing from the 2015 book 'The Residence: Inside the Private World of the White House,' a non-fiction account of the behind-the-scenes staff who work official events, as well as accommodate the whims and needs of the first family in their private residence. The latter is where the dead body is discovered. Starring Uzo Aduba, Cordelia Cupp is a sleuth defined by her competence. That's her quirk. It's a great spin on a character trope more typically written as an over-the-top eccentric genius. Cordelia can be blunt, which generates all kinds of sputtering and appalled reactions, which she blithely ignores. People assume she cares what they think of her. She doesn't! A Senate hearing investigating her investigation provides a framing device for much of the season, in which relevant witnesses recall what happened on the night of the murder. Randall Park plays the FBI agent who is paired with Cordelia, though she has little use for him and he tries to get this point across in his testimony. 'And she didn't care about anything you said?' a senator asks? 'No! She didn't care about what anybody said! And a lot of people were saying things at that point.' Striding around the White House in her wooly brown suit and nerdy sweater vest, she's too self-assured to even notice, let alone be bothered. She's there to work, but she doesn't make a show of it because she doesn't have to. Her reputation for solving unsolvable crimes precedes her. She doesn't rush into assumptions and this makes her a spiritual cousin of the indelible private detective Hercule Poirot, In one of Agatha Christie's novels, he's asked what he thinks. 'As yet, I think nothing,' he says. 'I collect only impressions. What kind of people they were, all those who were involved and what happened exactly on those last few days?' This is Cordelia's style as well. Instead of setting up a murder board, she quietly sketches and jots down her thoughts in a journal. She's a serious birder, which seems to confuse or at least annoy everyone, but it reflects her curiosity and her patience. Her interview technique is to simply sit and stare until the person becomes so uncomfortable they start babbling. It's nearly impossible for anyone to get a read on Cordelia, and Aduba is having a lot of fun with the role. The dead man, one A.B. Wynter (Giancarlo Esposito), was a head of the household staff. Elegantly professional, we get a sense of who he was in flashbacks, where he's shown to be an impeccable if quietly demanding, sometimes inflexible boss. When he loses his cool with subordinates, it's behind closed doors. But in public, he's the picture of self-control. Who would want him gone? Any number of people who were at the White House that night are possible suspects, with a focus on the 'downstairs' personnel, including a pastry chef (Bronson Pinchot), a maintenance worker (Mel Rodriguez), a housekeeper (Julieth Restrepo) and a butler (Edwina Findley). As for the president (Paul Fitzgerald), he's a cypher. His political party, or anything even hinting in that direction, never comes up. His bland facade is occasionally threatened by a freeloading brother (Jason Lee) who also lives in the White House because he's the rogue family member who needs stashing away to prevent any unseemly PR disasters. The president's vodka-loving mother-in-law (Jane Curtin) also lives in the White House, and she's able to tell Cordelia the exact time she heard a thump when Wynter's body hit the floor a few rooms over. How can you be so precise, Cordelia asks suspiciously? 'Well, I have a clock,' says the older woman, gesturing to a nearby digital clock with large red numbers. ' That is a clock,' Cupp concurs. Reader, I have the same clock. The numbers are enormous. I bought it specifically so I could see the time from anywhere in the room. I had to laugh. I also love a throwaway gag as two people go at it amorously in the kitchen; the physical comedy is brief but wonderfully ridiculous as they're splayed on a counter with all four legs clanging on the pots and pans hanging overhead. The show is structured as a manor house murder mystery and wears its influences on its sleeve. Impatient with Cordelia's process, one outraged and betuxed member of the president's inner circle declares: 'I don't care if she's Miss Marple or Sherlock Holmes or whoever Daniel Craig is in that movie.' Episode 3 is literally titled 'Knives Out,' just in case anyone missed the parallels. But if anything, I wonder if the concept would be better suited to a more traditional network TV-style series, featuring Cordelia Cupp in a new location each week, solving another unsolvable crime. She's the kind of character who could work in any setting, surrounded by a new ensemble each time. That requires a strong, no-nonsense performance (check) but also writing that understands what makes self-contained storytelling so satisfying on an episode-by-episode basis (and there are real hints of that here). 'Murder, She Wrote' made it work for 12 seasons and 264 episodes. It's a shame streaming platforms have lesser ambitions. 'The Residence' — 3 stars (out of 4) Where to watch: Netflix
