Uzo Aduba is no stranger to the Emmys. She’s already won three of them — two for her breakthrough role as Suzanne “Crazy Eyes” Warren in Netflix’s prison dramedy “Orange Is the New Black” and one for her powerful performance as political pioneer Shirley Chisholm in the FX miniseries “Mrs. America.”
Aduba’s latest Emmy nomination, the sixth of her career, is for her work in Netflix’s short-lived White House whodunit “The Residence,” in which she portrays the eccentric, witty and damn good consulting detective Cordelia Cupp, whose keen eye for detail, extreme confidence and unequivocal passion for birding keep her leaps and bounds ahead of everyone else. Cordelia is brought in to solve the murder of White House chief usher A.B. Wynter (Giancarlo Esposito), whose death catapults her into an intricate web of oddball personalities.
But that doesn’t mean Aduba has gotten used to the accolades — far from it, actually. “It’s wild,” the 44-year-old actress said during a recent Zoom interview. “It’s literally that feeling of, ‘Wow, that’s crazy.’” Aduba is on the precipice of making her own Emmy history should she triumph over incumbent Jean Smart, Ayo Edebiri, Quinta Brunson and Kristen Bell for Outstanding Lead Actress in a Comedy Series. She’s in line to tie four-time winners Alfre Woodard and Regina King for most acting Emmys earned by a Black performer. “Wild is the word that I keep using for this. That’s my word this year.”
So it comes with some bittersweetness that the door is now permanently closed on “The Residence,” which received three additional nods for production design, visual effects and its main title theme music. Prior to its July 2 cancellation after one season (just a little over a week after Emmy voting concluded), creator Paul William Davies alluded to the possibility of Aduba’s Cordelia solving a new murder mystery outside the walls of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue in Season 2.
“We had an incredible time making that show. That’s just the bottom line. Our (group) chat is still going. We’re still hanging out,” Aduba said. Though “it would have been wonderful to see what other adventures Cordelia would go on, the truth of the matter is, I always feel like my characters go on anyway — I think Suzanne right now is out doing amazing things. I never think their stories end. So I keep sitting with that fundamental truth that I let my imagination live with.”
You’re one of the few actors who have been recognized by the Television Academy in both the comedy and drama categories. Does each nomination feel different to you?
Yes. I think the first of anything always feels like it’s in a different stratosphere. Particularly for my first [Emmy nomination and win for “Orange Is the New Black”], there was so much wrapped in that first — my first show, all of those things. I had so little knowledge of what I had stepped into. The whole thing was like you’re driving a car on a highway and it’s whipping past you. Did you see that? That’s amazing!
I have different relationships with each experience as I have grown as a human, an actor, a person working in this business, and also as my life has grown. Every single person has their own experiences that none of us are privy to that are joyful and challenging, and then there are things we all experienced collectively five years ago [with the pandemic]. But I think when you start to live a little more, they all take on a different shape because life has informed the experience in different ways that make the celebration of the moment different. And the shape of the work is already being infused by those experiences. Because of all of those lived experiences, what I have developed is an even greater appreciation for getting to be able to do this thing.
Piggybacking off that, how have your lived experience and your current place in life shaped your understanding of Cordelia Cupp? Could you have done this role at the start of your career?
That’s a great question. You know, I needed this part to come to me in a moment when I was a bit longer in my spine. As it relates to the work, I am not sure at an early stage in my career I would have trusted stillness as an action, a strong action. That actually requires you to have lived a little bit to know what it is to be strong in a single choice. I would have thought I needed to do something all the time with Cordelia when, number one, that’s not what’s written, and number two, how Paul William Davies shaped the story is she’s a birder. Her hobby is to be still, and she applies that hobby to what it is that she does. I’m not sure I would have had the trust in myself to just practice the exercise, because that’s kind of how I think of acting. What is this act? What is this part supposed to be? An exercise in stillness, and [let] that be enough.
You’ve mentioned before how different you are from Cordelia in everything, from mannerisms to speaking style — she really loves her metaphors and she can be incredibly frank. What did living in her skin teach you?
Well, you’ve seen me move like 19 times while talking. [Laughs] What I did learn from her is that sometimes you can actually just sit back and let the news come to you. You don’t always have to deliver the news — just let the information come to you. I think that’s an exercise in journalism as I understand it. A departure for me is I probably don’t say everything that she will say. [Laughs] She’ll say something and it’s like, “What did she just say about my hair?” and she’s already onto the next thing. She will tell you every single drip and drop of what she’s thinking.
I needed this part to come to me in a moment when I was a bit longer in my spine. As it relates to the work, I am not sure at an early stage in my career I would have trusted stillness as an action, a strong action.
What I really got from her is the ability to listen. Details matter, and that’s how she pieces things together. To listen when the bell goes off. She heightened my ear a little bit to really listen to the details of what someone is saying. But the big piece is it’s OK to just settle and receive.
She’s also a character who’s built up as the world’s best detective, which has a level of pressure attached to it. How did you live up to that reputation?
The key piece was to not have reverence whenever she’s walking into the room. That to her, every place she ever is — it doesn’t matter if it’s the White House or the Vatican — it’s a crime scene. That beat before we see her birding on the South Lawn, she might take a breath, and it would not be because she’s about to step in the White House; it’s because she’s about to have her dream come true to satisfy [Teddy Roosevelt’s] birding list, which she never would have been able to achieve unless she had a reason to be in the House.
At the end of the day, she knows what she does is something very important, and that’s to solve murders. It gave her the backbone to be the way she would be with chief adviser Harry Hollinger [Ken Marino] or the president or the Australian prime minister. She’s not intimidated because the truth of the matter is in her world, she’s the best. I wanted her, from minute one, to know she belongs.
There’s a poignant moment in the series when Cordelia tells her nephew the story of her first case — finding her sister’s missing favorite sock, a gift from their brother — after he tells her his mother calls her “difficult” and “single-minded.” It’s such a vital scene because it reveals who Cordelia is, how she operates and why she’s so settled into the way she is. Was that scene eye-opening for you?
I was so thankful to Paul for having written it. I thought that scene told two stories. Number one, how she keeps a face that nobody can read. In that episode, you realize there is a huge loss happening in that family [with the death of Cordelia’s brother], and what I mined from that was, I wonder who Cordelia was two clicks before that happened. People deal with grief in all different ways, and maybe this is how she could manage her feelings. Imagine she might actually not be an emotionless person; she maybe actually feels a lot of things and in order to not feel those things, she has to put a lid on it, to keep it down here because if it gets to even chest level, that’s too much. And that’s how she was able to survive that moment, and it continued throughout her and her sister’s life.
The other piece of it for me was there are different ways to love, and just because she does not love in the same way and function as her sister does not mean she cannot love or has not shown expressions of love. That story, I thought, was so revealing of who Cordelia is and the size of her heart; she would use this that she knows she’s good at — remembering details — to give that level of importance to her sister’s most valued item because it takes her back to that valued time when the family was whole. Those socks probably meant something to Cordelia too, and she needs her sister to be whole. She can’t lose anything more.
Is there a specific episode you hang your hat on?
I would say [Episode] 8 is the strongest in terms of what it meant to me. We find out who did it. We find out how Cordelia found out. In that episode, Paul did such a great job of warping us into her mind. She was interested in finding out who did it, but she was also very invested in “The Real Housewives of the White House,” you know? [Laughs] Like, why are all these people doing all these crazy things?
She was secretly thriving with all the gossip.
Yeah! She wanted the tea. She wanted to know what was going on. [Laughs] That’s the only episode where everybody is together and that was really satisfying. I spent seven episodes working with all of them — Randall [Park], Giancarlo, Susan [Kelechi Watson], Edwina [Findley], Jason [Lee], Ken, Molly [Griggs] — but it was the first time I got to see the collection of us together. We had each been in our individual silos, but to be able to come together, it made it really fun. They met Detective Cupp [in the beginning], and in 8, they met Cordelia. You get to see why she loves her job and she’s really excited to walk you through this thing, and they got to meet the real woman, which I really liked.
Ever since you broke through with “Orange Is the New Black,“ you’ve made your time in front of the camera count. How would you sum up these past 12 years?
More than I’ve ever dreamed it could be. I did not dream all of this. I dreamed too small.
This story first ran in the Down to the Wire Comedy issue of TheWrap’s awards magazine. Read more from the issue here.
