In her new HBO series, In Treatment, Uzo Aduba’s nonverbal choices as therapist Dr. Brooke Taylor loom large. There’s magic in the exhalations that escape Aduba when a client leaves, the steadiness of her voice incongruent with the tears welling in her eyes, and the almost imperceptible way she leans forward or back in her chair when responding to clients.
This isn’t new for Aduba, a master of facial expressions. She played Suzanne “Crazy Eyes” Warren in Netflix’s Orange Is the New Black, her wild-eyed glances often juxtaposed with the poetry she employed in an attempt to woo Piper Chapman (Taylor Schilling). In FX’s Mrs. America, when she plays Shirley Chisholm, the first woman to campaign for the Democratic Party presidential nomination, Aduba assumes the confident gestures of a seasoned politician and the stern glances of a woman on a mission. In these supporting roles, Aduba uses her entire body like a maestro, and our emotions rise and fall on key. It’s part of how she plays with the freedom of invention inherent in the “just slightly left-of-center roles” she tells me she tends to find intriguing.
For someone who’s known for being so expressive, In Treatment offers Aduba a new vehicle. The series, which premieres on May 23 and casts Aduba in her first leading role, is technically in its fourth season. But these new episodes premiere 10 years after season three concluded and reimagine the protagonist as a Black woman therapist who helps clients with startlingly relatable concerns.
“It’s powerful to see your stories told in spaces—with the uniqueness and identities that are attached to you still coming along the way—that you do inhabit, but just never happened to see yourself reflected back [in],” Aduba says. As she points out, audiences have seen this show before, but never with a Black woman sitting in the almighty therapist’s seat.
As a Black senior health editor who reports on the mental health challenges and barriers Black people in America face, In Treatment was both captivating and challenging for me to watch. There I was following a Black woman whose entire job is to help others but who herself is “in need of help and not receiving it,” Aduba says.
In 2019, an estimated 17.3% of Black people in the U.S. had a mental illness, according to the National Survey on Drug Use and Health (NSDUH) by the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration. Since then, we’ve seen a pandemic that has disproportionately affected Black communities while playing out at the same time as multiple acts of violence against Black people. It’s no surprise that Black folks are experiencing increased mental health issues these days. But it’s also far too difficult for many of us to get the care we need. That same NSDUH survey indicates that while 19.8% of non-Hispanic white people received mental health treatment in 2019, only 9.8% of non-Hispanic Black people did the same. One reason for this is that many Black people feel most comfortable with Black therapists, but demand exceeds supply. In 2018, only 4% of U.S. psychologists were Black, according to the American Psychological Association’s most recent data.
Black mental health professionals themselves are experiencing untold levels of burnout. What’s more, Black women—who live with the expectation that we must save ourselves, our communities, and the entire republic—are taught to perform at high levels, often under duress. Seeing Dr. Taylor navigate personal and professional challenges while struggling herself is a vivid reminder of the mental, physical, and emotional labor Black women perform every day, whether or not they’re trained therapists.
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 well-being.
“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.”
These days, Aduba is seeking comfort and joy in the small things. “It sounds so cliché, honestly. But [I’m] trying my best not to sweat the small stuff,” she says. “Just remembering, what are the real big galaxy-level issues that you need to hold onto, and what are the stars?” It’s a fitting guiding light for someone who not only plays a therapist on TV (and has a therapist of her own), but who also got her big break in a role that centered on Black mental health.
“I hadn’t yet seen the conversation happen about mental illness and mental health in the female Black community,” Aduba says of why her role as Crazy Eyes felt so powerful. Now, she continues the thread with Dr. Taylor. “In Treatment [is] that conversation that we’re now really breaking into, which I hope is real: the out-front, open, not-hidden discussion about mental health.”
So, what’s next for Aduba? Unsurprisingly, legacy is on Aduba’s mind these days, specifically when it comes to creating more visibility in the creative world for people who look like her and have diverse experiences—both on and off camera.
“Occupying space to me now is making enough room not just for my elbows, but for my arms to extend out slowly and wide so that there’s room beside me and behind,” she explains. “The space that I’m talking about is enough for everybody who stands beside me to go through and for everybody behind me to come through. Big enough that those who came before me look back with pride.”
Her turn as Dr. Brooke Taylor is a clear and precise attempt to carve out that space. When I ask if she’s thought about how fans will react to her first lead role, she shudders at the mention of the public reception. “That I don’t know,” she says. “That makes me nauseous to think about.” It turns out the award-winning actor says she hasn’t spent a lot of time yet contemplating how fans will receive her performance. Then, after a bit of thought, she offers this: “I hope it gives the healing and peace that I found in making it.”