Gari Askew II

CFA Alumni

Backstage Magazine Feature: How Uzo Aduba Became Queen of the Small Screen

Boston University College of Fine Arts alum Uzo Aduba (CFA’05) always stays true to her artistry

Originally published in the June 17 issue of Backstage magazine. By Casey Mink. Photos by Gari Askew II

When Uzo Aduba arrived in New YorkCity in pursuit of an acting career, she knew it would be the hardest thing she ever did. 

“What I didn’t know,” she says, “was that there was a space that existed for someone like myself that was rather narrow. And that lane was not going to align with my dreams. What I had to do at some point, that I never expected, was figure out: Is the goal just to work, or is the goal to do what you want to do and say and be as an artist?”

It took some time, as well as learning, to be comfortable with feeling, at times, “like you’re watching your dreams slip away.” But as she talks via Zoom from her new home in Los Angeles, there’s no doubt about the path Aduba ultimately took.

She doesn’t mince words, though: It was tough. Which is why that path—now lined with three Emmy Awards and the leading role on HBO’s revival of its mid-2000s drama “In Treatment”—wasn’t just helped along by teachers, but defined by them. 

“What I’m clear about in my life—and I don’t even mean to make it sound exceptional, because almost everybody has people who are ‘way-makers,’ who stood at a crossroads and said, ‘No, boo. This way,’ ” Aduba reflects. “Those are people who see you and see the wholeness of what you can do.”

Growing up in a suburb of Boston, Aduba enjoyed performing but never considered it as anything beyond a hobby. As the daughter of Nigerian immigrants, “School was something that I did understand, was something that I had to pursue,” she explains. Which isn’t to say her parents have ever been unsupportive. It just meant that in fifth grade, when a teacher told her she should take choir instead of a second science class, “I remember being so nervous, like, ‘But my parents said I was supposed to do two sciences!’ ”

That teacher, Mrs. Bruno, changed the trajectory of Aduba’s life. So did a middle school teacher, Mr. Hersee, who pushed her to sing Whitney Houston’s “I Will Always Love You” at a concert a year later, prompting her to acknowledge, for the first time, “I think I can sing?” 

And in high school, it was her creative writing teacher, Ms. Mehleis, who kept her after class one day to ask if she’d given any thought to attending college for the performing arts. “I very much thought I was going to be a lawyer, because I can talk a lot, as you can see,” she says with a laugh. “I must’ve been looking at her like she was speaking gibberish. Then she said, ‘You know you can go to school for this, right?’ I had no idea, but it made total sense when she said it. I remember a lightbulb went off in my head: That’s what I’m supposed to do with my life.”

And so she decided she would. She first studied classical voice at Boston University, and then, it was on to New York to live out what she calls “a very classic story”: a restaurant job at City Lobster & Crab Company on 49th Street and 6th Avenue, and an apartment in Sunnyside, Queens, that she would sometimes have to return to on foot because she couldn’t afford train fare. “A lot of empty fridges,” she remembers. “But I loved it. I loved it.” 

…

The first named character she booked—the one for which she would need to join SAG, because she was not yet even a member—was Suzanne “Crazy Eyes” Warren on Netflix’s “Orange Is the New Black,” one of the first-ever streaming series. She’d win two Emmy Awards for the role and become one of the most recognizable TV actors of the 2010s. 

She’d win another Emmy, her third, in 2020 for FX on Hulu’s all-star limited series “Mrs. America,” in which she played the activist and first Black Congresswoman Shirley Chisholm, starring alongside the likes of Cate Blanchett, Rose Byrne, and Margo Martindale. But on that show, as on “Orange,” she was one member of an ensemble—an integral piece of a much larger tapestry. That makes her leading role on HBO’s revamped “In Treatment” (on what’s technically considered the show’s fourth season) a new feat for the actor. 

Most episodes follow Aduba’s character, therapist Dr. Brooke Taylor, in-session with one of her patients (played by Anthony Ramos and John Benjamin Hickey, among others). As such, she is in pretty much every scene. So while the series feels like as much of a team effort as any other she’s worked on, “It was certainly different in that way, in terms of #NoDaysOff,” she says. “I was drawn to, and understood, [Brooke’s] experience with pain and loss. And I was curious about therapy from the therapist’s point of view.”

Aduba usually has a question that she tries to answer with every project she does. For “In Treatment,” which premiered in May, it was: Why do people go to therapy? But in general, “That question usually starts [to raise] a lot of other questions that I didn’t even know I was wondering about,” she says. “That sort of starts to shape that person into being.”

Aduba hesitates to describe whatever that actor’s impulse, desire, or drive may be as “bravery.” And she doesn’t know if it will arrive for her next role or the one after. But what she is certain of today, as she enters this next career chapter—arguably her most monumental to date—is that she is exactly where she should be. And thank goodness for that. 

“Art and reality start to have mirrors. I had just never had that experience before, where the two things sort of came into space at such a critical moment that I just know it was the thing that I was supposed to be doing right now,” she says of “In Treatment.” “I feel like when I normally do my work, it goes out this way, like it’s an offering. This was the first time I felt like I was getting something back. And I don’t know where that came from. But I know I needed to be in that space for it to happen.”

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