Uzo Aduba Is Healing—And Wants You to Heal Too - SELF

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Watching In Treatment is like peering through your therapist’s window during a session. If you’ve done therapy sessions via Zoom, you might see yourself in Eladio (Anthony Ramos) as he whispers to Dr. Taylor in his employer’s home. If you catch suppressed emotions like frustration on Aduba’s face, you might wonder about your own therapist’s wellbeing.

“Her role in the room is to be whatever her patients need her to be,” Aduba says plainly of her character. Channeling this persona helped the Emmy Award-winning actor flex new muscles. To prepare, Aduba discussed the therapeutic process with actual therapists. (“This is a super hard job,” she laughs. “No wonder you take a whole month off.”) But she also had to forego a core part of her typical creative process while embodying Dr. Taylor: emotional distance from her characters. Whether playing a fictional person or historical figure, Aduba tends to disconnect from her roles at the end of the day. “I’m not method,” she says. She then frowns as if searching for the right words. “Normally, I do turn off.” But that’s not the case when it came to portraying Dr. Taylor. The role hit too close to home.

“This was—,” Aduba says before stopping herself, then continuing. “I don't even know why I'm saying this, but this was one of—if not the first—times where my life was aligning with the thing that I'm being asked to play.” Dr. Taylor, Aduba explains, “is in a very complicated moment in her life,” especially because she is swimming in the depths of grief after losing her father.

If you follow Aduba closely, you’ve heard about her mother. Stories about the larger-than-life woman who immigrated to the United States from Nigeria—a survivor of both polio and the Igbo genocide during the 1960s—feature prominently in many of Aduba’s press appearances. There’s the story about how Aduba learned to love her first name, Uzoamaka, an Igbo name that means “the road is good.” As it goes, she once asked her mother to call her “Zoe” because it was easier to pronounce.

“If they can learn to say ‘Tchaikovsky’ and ‘Michelangelo’ and ‘Dostoyevsky,’ they can learn to say Uzoamaka,” her mother replied.

We are chatting the day after Aduba tweeted for the first time about losing her mother to cancer last November. “I could talk to her about anything, quite frankly. Absolutely anything,” Aduba says. I ask Aduba what vulnerability looked like between the pair, and she gestures to her appearance. “It looked like this,” she says. “Today, on wash day, the best I can give you is this hat. And I'm fine with it.”

Last year, glowing in her braided updo, tear-drop earrings, and black boat-neck t-shirt with Breonna Taylor’s name emblazoned across her chest, Aduba accepted the Emmy for Outstanding Supporting Actor in a Limited Series or Movie for her role in Mrs. America. After a series of emphatic “wows,” a visibly shocked Aduba shouted, “Mom, I won,” in a voice recognizable to adult daughters who can mark milestones by moments they’ve yelled to an adoring mother in a different room.

Grief, it seems, has been a defining feature of the last year and a half for Aduba. And, although Aduba’s loss isn’t COVID-19-related, she joins millions of bereaved—family members, partners, friends, and coworkers—who are learning to move forward in the wake of a world-upending death.

So, as it turns out, Aduba didn’t need to rely much on her usual creativity to paint a picture of a daughter in mourning. “It was just like, ‘Oh, there isn't a lot of need for invention,’” she says. Then, unprompted, as if in a therapy session with herself, she asks, “What does that feel like?” Her response is swift: “Very uncomfortable. You're reaching into your own well, aren't you? And that's uncomfortable. A lot of times when I do my work, I think of it as something to give out, which I still hope that's what this project will do. But this was the first time I'd worked on something that I felt like I got something.” When I ask what, precisely, she got, her answer is unwavering: “Healing.”

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