Uzo Aduba dons a detective’s cape in ‘The Residence’

Uzo Aduba knows how to stare.

First, there was her piercing fixation as Suzanne “Crazy Eyes” Warren in 90 episodes of “Orange Is the New Black.” Then, her room-commanding gaze as politician Shirley Chisholm in “Mrs. America,” followed by her nuanced poker face as therapist Dr. Brooke Taylor on the fourth season of “In Treatment.”

Now, as Det. Cordelia Cupp on Netflix’s Shondaland-produced screwball caper “The Residence,” premiering Thursday, Aduba plays an extremely perceptive, bird-watching investigator whose unconventional methods and unblinking looks help solve a White House murder mystery.

On her quest to figure out who killed the residence’s chief usher, Aduba’s Cupp revels in silence and dryly delivers her crime-scene observations. Some of the series’ most captivating scenes involve Cupp simply staring at her various suspects as they squirm and voluntarily incriminate themselves.

“Uzo has this ability to have so much going on in complete moments of a deadpan silence,” said co-star Randall Park, who plays FBI agent Edwin Park. “I was so inspired by that.”

By the time the season finale of “The Residence” comes around and Cupp gets to gleefully reveal how she solved the mystery, “She feels almost like a buried powder keg or a kettle of water on the stovetop,” Aduba said in a video interview, “slowly bubbling until it whistles at the end.”

In real life, Aduba is constantly at a boil.

The 44-year-old is an effusive storyteller who delights in the details as she grins broadly or furrows her brow in thought. As a listener, she’s equally open, intermittently widening her eyes in concern or throwing her head back to laugh at full tilt.

She seems to relish experiencing the full spectrum of human emotions, whether sitting in grief, sharing her trepidations about starting a new fitness routine on TikTok or simply making shrimp tacos while listening to Tracy Chapman.

As Aduba’s “Mrs. America” co-star Cate Blanchett put it in a separate phone interview: “When I think about her, I think about how much I want to be alive.”

Moving into “The Residence”

In the long tradition of eccentric detectives onscreen — Inspector Clouseau, Miss Marple, Benoit Blanc, Sherlock Holmes, Jessica Fletcher, Hercule Poirot — they are almost always white and frequently men.

In short, they don’t usually look like Aduba.

“Revolution is taking someone like me and putting her in any role and genre they’d consider right for a white woman,” Aduba wrote in her 2024 memoir, “The Road Is Good” (the title is a translation from Igbo to English of her full first name).

Did she view playing Cordelia Cupp as revolutionary?

“Absolutely,” Aduba said. “Even down to the costuming. What I found so satisfying and educational was when I’m in that tweed coat, and you see the vest and the collared shirt and the bag and the whole thing together, you see how exactly right it is that anybody, metaphorically, can don that cape.”

Aduba on playing a detective: “What I found so satisfying and educational was when I’m in that tweed coat, and you see the vest and the collared shirt and the bag and the whole thing together, you see how exactly right it is that anybody, metaphorically, can don that cape.”

(Jessica Brooks / Netflix)

Shondaland, the production company helmed by Shonda Rhimes and famed for series such as “Scandal,” “How to Get Away With Murder” and “Bridgerton,” had kept Aduba on its radar for a while as it considered projects that might make sense for her to lead, said Shondaland executive Betsy Beers.

“She was born to be the lead of a show,” Beers said. “She’s the real deal, and she’s the full package.”

“I have been a huge fan of Uzo for years, and I was thrilled when she signed on to do this show,” said Rhimes in an email. “Watching her bring Det. Cupp to life, infusing the character with her own charm, humor and sincerity has been a true joy.”

According to Shondaland executive Betsy Beers, Uzo Aduba had been on the production company’s radar for a while. “She was born to be the lead of a show,” she said.

(Jason Armond / Los Angeles Times)

Still, few shows experience as much tumult and change in a single season as “The Residence” did. First came the 2023 Hollywood actors’ and writers’ strikes, which halted production for several months after they’d filmed four of the show’s eight episodes.

Then, during that hiatus, Andre Braugher, who originally played the victim at the center of the mystery, died after a brief illness in December 2023. When production resumed in early 2024, Giancarlo Esposito took Braugher’s place and reshot his scenes. Park said Aduba’s “bright spirit” served as the cast’s “guiding light” as they navigated that difficult time.

Aduba, who had been pregnant while shooting the first batch of episodes, also gave birth during the pause and returned to set new mom to a daughter, Adaiba (with her husband, filmmaker Robert Sweeting).

“That was wild,” she said of transitioning to motherhood during the shoot, adding that the cast “really clung to each other because we had experienced birth, we had experienced loss.”

“The Residence” creator and showrunner Paul William Davies credited Aduba’s leadership with setting the tone for the rest of the cast and crew as they navigated the changes.

“I think everybody brought their best work because they could see the person that was No. 1 on the call sheet was working just as hard as any other person, if not more so, and treated everybody with kindness and respect,” Davies said. “It makes an enormous difference in how a show runs when you have somebody like that leading the effort.”

A “terrifying” leap

Uzoamaka Aduba was always going to be a star. It just wasn’t clear what kind of a star she would be.

First, there was figure skating. Growing up in Medfield, Mass., a small, predominantly white town outside of Boston, Aduba idolized Surya Bonaly, the French skater known for landing backflips on the ice and one of the few prominent Black figure skaters at the time.

By high school, Aduba was traveling hours to train and compete on her quest to make the U.S. national team. But skating was expensive, and the family’s finances were stretched thin between Aduba and her four college-bound siblings.

So she switched to track. Again, she excelled, and she earned a track scholarship to Boston University, where she honed her powerhouse vocals and love of theater as a voice major.

After graduating in 2005, she moved to New York, scraping by waiting tables at a seafood restaurant near Times Square as she landed roles in off-Broadway and eventually Broadway productions, including a 2011 revival of “Godspell.”

By 2012, she had gotten to a place in her theater career where she could pay her rent and live comfortably without taking odd jobs on the side. But she longed for a new challenge. She told her agent to only put her forward for TV and film auditions and to turn down any theater offers that might come in.

After several years of working in theater, Uzo Aduba decided she wanted to branch out to TV and film.

(Jason Armond / Los Angeles Times)

It was a bold strategy. Apart from a faceless shot briefly featured in a reenactment scene in a PBS slavery docuseries, Aduba had never acted on camera before. Theater had seemed to be an inclusive space “like an island of misfit toys,” she said, but television was a medium she viewed as largely off-limits to her.

“Not just as a Black woman — as a dark-skinned, non-Western-conforming Black woman of African beauty, with a name that no one has ever heard or seen before, with a gap in my teeth, with my full lips, with my broad nose,” Aduba said. “I had seen one woman, really, maybe a handful: Whoopi [Goldberg]. Alfre [Woodard]. Beah [Richards]. I think even that list feels too long. It didn’t feel wide, the atmosphere.”

Aduba spent that summer going on nearly 100 TV and film auditions and facing rejection after rejection, as her worst fears seemed to be confirmed.

“I was watching my bank account go down and down and down and the nos go up and up and up. I was terrified,” she said. “If I’m being really, really honest — financially, it was terrifying, yes, but it was even scarier to try to risk going into this medium of television and film at that time, because I was confident there was no place for me. I was trying to go into something that I didn’t think I was invited to, and I was hearing enough nos to feel like I wasn’t invited.”

Earning the industry’s respect

On a blistering summer day, Aduba quickly styled her hair in Bantu knots as she prepared to trudge to another round of back-to-back auditions, certain more nos were on the way. She had almost reached her breaking point.

One audition was for a new streaming series called “Orange Is the New Black,” a novelty concept in an age where Netflix still mailed DVDs.

Casting director Jennifer Euston had seen Aduba perform in “Godspell” on Broadway the previous fall and been wowed by her haunting solo, “By My Side.” Because Aduba’s agent mentioned that her client also ran track, Euston asked Aduba to audition for the part of Janae, a former track star who lands in Litchfield Penitentiary.

Aduba nailed her audition, and Euston excitedly sent her tape to showrunner Jenji Kohan.

“I want her for Crazy Eyes,” Euston recalled Kohan telling her right away. Euston hadn’t even begun casting that role, but they offered her the part without considering other actors or having her return to read for it.

Uzo Aduba as Suzanne “Crazy Eyes” Warren in Season 2 of Netflix’s “Orange Is the New Black.” The breakout role earned her two Emmys over the show’s seven seasons.

(JoJo Whilden / Netflix)

By Aduba’s estimates, she began “Orange Is the New Black” as No. 53 on a call sheet of 60 rotating ensemble cast members. Suzanne (a.k.a. Crazy Eyes) was originally slated to appear in only two or three episodes, but thanks to Aduba’s performance, the character grew into a series regular and fan favorite that earned Aduba two Emmys.

“She’s very grounded. She’s very centered,” Euston said of Aduba.”That’s what you needed to be able to pull off a role like Crazy Eyes in earnest, to really be believable.”

When “Orange Is the New Black” ended in 2019, Aduba followed it with the limited series “Mrs. America,” in which she played Chisholm, the first Black candidate for a major party’s presidential nomination.

The FX show was executive produced by Blanchett, who also co-starred as conservative activist Phyllis Schlafly, and when they began the table read for the Chisholm-centric third episode, Aduba left the Oscar winner speechless.

As Aduba ran through scenes in which Chisholm triumphantly campaigned or despaired at the obstacles to her success, “You could hear a pin drop,” Blanchett said. “It’s like she had already imbibed the spirit of Chisholm, and that was a really remarkable moment for all of us. Everyone left the read and we couldn’t speak. It was jaw-dropping.”

After “Orange Is the New Black,” Uzo Aduba earned her third Emmy portraying trailblazing politician Shirley Chisholm in “Mrs. America.”

(Jason Armond / Los Angeles Times)

Aduba’s work on “Mrs. America” earned her a third Emmy, but it was also a period filled with deep sadness. While filming, Aduba had been grappling with her mother’s pancreatic cancer diagnosis.

“She’s somebody who carries an understanding that to be fully alive, you have to embrace grief, and that’s something that I really appreciate with her,” Blanchett said. “She doesn’t get bogged down in that grief, but she carries it with her, with grace and dignity.”

And when Aduba began working on her memoir soon after, she shifted focus from writing about her own Hollywood tales to delving into her parents’ early lives in Nigeria, their immigration journey to the U.S. and how her mother had raised Aduba to take on the world.

“It just felt like, without her really saying it, she knew this [book] was probably the lasting account of her life, and that became a priority to me, the story of our lives together,” Aduba said of her mother, Nonyem, who died in 2020. “She made me believe I could do anything, and I foolishly believed her.”

Aduba is hoping to inspire her now 16-month-old daughter in a similar manner. She recently filmed the crime-drama movie “Roofman” opposite Channing Tatum and Kirsten Dunst, an experience she called “very freeing” and one that gave her “the chance to do things I’ve never done onscreen.” As of publication, Netflix has not confirmed a second season of “The Residence.” However, the streamer submitted the show as a comedy rather than a limited series for Emmys consideration, hinting at a renewal. Showrunner Davies also said he would “love to be able to tell more Cordelia stories, and I have plenty to tell.”

The actor isn’t sure what career frontiers she’d like to chart next. Perhaps a movie musical or a return to the stage, but she’s keeping her options open.

“That’s the job of the artist, right? It’s to not live in the safe space. It’s to always challenge yourself, to do the hard thing, to take the risky shot,” Aduba said. “I don’t know what’s next. I know I don’t want to be comfortable. I do know that. So, whatever form that takes, I’m interested.”