Cush Jumbo on Hamlet, The Good Fight and not backing down

Sometimes innocuous questions elicit the most revealing answers. I’ve been talking to Cush Jumbo for an hour about the language of Shakespeare, the taboo of revenge and the drawbacks of method acting.

She is engaging, funny, driven. Then I ask why, in her most recent TV shows The Beast Must Die and Deadwater Fell, her hair was so much shorter than in her previous roles.

I sense the gears changing. Jumbo, the 36-year-old daughter of a Nigerian-born father and Yorkshire-born mother, steels herself. “It’s weird, because people think it’s some ethnic statement about myself.” A little reluctantly, very methodically, she tells the real story.

One of Britain’s most exciting new actors of recent years, Jumbo was starring in season two of The Good Fight, CBS’s brilliantly entertaining legal drama, in 2018. She was also pregnant. Two weeks before the birth, she was filming scenes in heels. Four months after the birth, she was due back on set. “I couldn’t get back in my costumes if I didn’t lose the weight. To lose the weight, I had to stop breastfeeding,” she says. She had worked out at the gym until a week before the birth and started back barely a month later.

That would be quite enough for most new parents. But because the filming in New York often involved 15-hour days, Jumbo would leave before her son woke up and return when he was asleep. “I could go four or five days without seeing my four-month-old awake . . . It was really making me quite low.”

Jumbo consulted other actresses who told her to “get the time back” where she could. She zeroed in on the hour and a half she had to spend each day having her hair straightened and styled. “It’s the first time I’m saying this on record.” Her words are now very deliberate, her voice close to breaking. “I asked the producers if I could shave my head, get rid of that hair, and have a wig made, to get an hour back so I could see the baby every day. And they said no.

“They said that the hair was too tightly tied to the character. And they were panicking about whether they could find a wig that would be exactly the same, which is BS, because you’re looking at one of the most well-known networks in the world.”

Part of The Good Fight’s appeal, in the Trump era, was its foregrounding of strong women. Its lead roles, including Jumbo’s Lucca Quinn, spoke out, got angry and won battles in and out of court. “I was really pissed off that a show that was so female-led, [where] the story that we put out into the world was that we supported women, said no to me.”

Jumbo didn’t fight back at the time. But when the season’s filming ended, “I was so enraged that I took a taxi home from the set to the barbers, and said, ‘Shave my head.’ I think the first time they found out I’d cut my hair off was when I posted something on Instagram that summer in the hiatus. We never discussed it, and we never argued about it. But a wig was made. And I went back next season, and I saw my son every morning. And that is how I ended up with short hair.”

CBS did not respond to requests for comment. Another actor, Julianna Margulies, revealed in 2015 that she wore a wig in The Good Wife, the predecessor to The Good Fight, for precisely the same reason — to spend more time with her baby.

It was the role of Lucca Quinn that supercharged Jumbo’s career. Did she worry about being sacked? “I’ll be really honest with you. At that point. I. Didn’t. Care. Ask any woman who has a six-month-old baby whether they start to care about the minutiae of stuff. When someone tells you you can’t see your baby, you will rip their throat out.”

She believes the producers’ stance was ultimately “about control”. “They were caught up in the idea of us being like imprint cartoons, that everything should always be exactly the same. No character in The Good Fight ever changes their hairstyle. In real life, women change their hair every week; they go in the rain and their hair changes.”

Some actors can make every story into a performance. Listening to Jumbo, what comes across is something purer: a desire for self-knowledge, a determination that life should not simply be what happens while you are making plans. “In this business you have to know why you’re doing everything. Because once you start to be successful, you start to make money. I don’t want to look back in 15 years and have no fucking memories of my son being small because I was working all the time.”

In acting, success can constrain you as much as it frees. In life, motherhood can free you as much as it constrains. “Once you’ve pushed a baby out of your vagina, a human, you get a bit ‘I can fucking do anything’,” she says, laughing.

Jumbo left The Good Fight last year, after four seasons. She and her husband Sean moved back to Britain at the start of the pandemic, coincidentally, so their son Max would grow up in London.

We meet on a Sunday morning, one of Jumbo’s few breaks from rehearsals for her much-delayed, much-anticipated appearance as Hamlet at the Young Vic. She arrives at the studio in Peckham carrying a green wellness drink and dropping the occasional F-word. “I’d fucking love to learn a language — and the piano!” she says, when I joke that she’s been too busy during lockdown.

She grew up nearby, in Lewisham, the second of six children. As a child, Jumbo loved theatre, but not Shakespeare. She blames the Victorians and her secondary school. “The teachers themselves were disoriented by the Shakespeare [texts], so they didn’t know how to teach it.” Half the class was “throwing chairs across the room”.

But she heard about the Brit School for performing arts and pestered her parents to enrol her. Aged 14, she was taught by writers, actors and directors who understood Shakespeare. “We did Measure for Measure. Our teacher was taking us through the last scene between the Duke and Isabella. My brain melted out of my ears when I understood that he was telling her that if she had sex with him she’d live . . . I couldn’t believe he was speaking like that. I think at that point that was really when I felt very British. I get this guy, and he gets me.”

After graduating from the Central School of Speech and Drama, Jumbo felt suffocated by the lack of black roles on offer in the UK: she could be a single mother, a girl from a council estate or someone’s best friend — “these weird parts that I didn’t feel like were real parts”, as she put it in 2019.

She worked as a cleaner, a waitress, a hostess in a strip club and even ran a pancake stall in East Dulwich market. “I used to look at my contemporaries and think, why the fuck are they working and I’m not working?” she says. In her lowest moments, she visualised suicide, leading her to start therapy and adopt a dog. She enrolled in a teaching training course, and prepared to turn her back on the arts.

But then, she gave herself one last chance. She wrote and performed Josephine and I, a one-woman show about the dancer turned civil rights activist Josephine Baker, whom she had admired since childhood. After it debuted to acclaim at a pub theatre in Camden, she was cast as Rosalind in As You Like It and then Mark Antony in Phyllida Lloyd’s all-female staging of Julius Caesar at the Donmar Warehouse, for which she was nominated for an Olivier award. When Josephine and I transferred to the US in 2015, The New York Times’s Ben Brantley said she projected “the kind of five-alarm charm that threatens to set rooms ablaze”.

From there came the part in The Good Wife. In ITV’s Vera, Jumbo had been almost the only person of colour. American TV was different. It suited her. On screen, Jumbo is wide-eyed and expressive, able to flick through emotions as an octopus can colours. She holds the scene.

In the breaks between TV seasons, while other actors went to do films, she returned to the theatre — “which American teams always think is crazy”. She took parts in The Taming of the Shrew in New York in 2016 and Common at London’s National Theatre the year after. Reviewing her Katherina in The Taming of the Shrew, the Financial Times said she had “comic talents reminiscent of Doris Day or Lucille Ball”.

In 2019, Jumbo was awarded an OBE. Did she have any qualms about the imperial connotations? “No, none! Second time I felt very British. I felt wholly British walking round the palace, felt like I belonged there . . . And I knew there were going to be kids looking at me in my Michael Kors outfit with the medal, so that’s just part of what I’m meant to be doing. They have to see that to know that it’s possible.”

But then everyone’s possibilities became redefined. By July last year, Jumbo was meant to be Hamlet at the Young Vic. Instead, she slipped into the empty theatre during lockdown and cried.

When Hamlet opens next week, it will not be the same play that was cancelled in 2020. “You know it’s going to be a different outcome because you’re a different person,” says Jumbo, pointing out her son is now three. “But it’s different especially because I’m very aware that [some of the ticket holders] are not alive any more.” The delay has rejigged the cast too. Line of Duty’s Adrian Dunbar now plays Claudius.

Women have played Hamlet for at least two and a half centuries. Dr Johnson called one, Kitty Clive, “better than Garrick”. But Jumbo is not after firsts. “If it’s for novelty, if it’s because you think people will come to see it, if it’s because you want to win an award — none of these things interest me.”

Each part she takes is an “investigation” and, with Hamlet, the investigation is into what it means to be a man. Hamlet, that uniquely self-examining Shakespearean character, is “a man who’s born too early, in the wrong time”, she says. “He does not fit in in this state of Denmark.”

What can Hamlet say about modern masculinity? The character seems irredeemably sexist. He says frailty’s name is woman, he mocks a woman’s love and he treats Ophelia terribly. Jumbo finds nuance in the language. “Is it ‘Frailty, thy name is woman’ or is it ‘Frailty, thy name is . . . woman, my mother is the one that’s frail’?”

Something bigger jars. Hamlet is mulling revenge but, five centuries later, hasn’t revenge lost legitimacy as a motivation? “There’s the part of revenge that’s what goes around comes around. You just wait. That person will get their just deserts,” says Jumbo. “And there’s this other part of it, which is blood for blood. You did something to me, I’m going to do something to you. That’s the bit we’re not supposed to do. I think people like to watch fictionalised revenge because there’s part of us as humans that is blood for blood.”

Shakespeare’s plays, so open to reinterpretation, have offered more openings for women and actors of colour than some modern scripts, which have a fixed idea of what the star should look like. But crossing boundaries is controversial. Russell T Davies, writer of the series It’s a Sin, has said that only gay actors should play gay characters. April Reign, creator of the campaign #OscarsSoWhite, has argued that white actors shouldn’t play characters of other ethnic groups, not least because they “won’t have the context and background to fully flesh out what that means”.

Where does Jumbo stand? “What are you trying to get me in here . . . ” she smiles. “I believe anybody can play any character from Shakespeare if they have the ability to play it.” The plays are about language, narrative and power, not who the actor is.

But she extends the argument to modern roles. “[I’m] no longer having to look at the top of the tagline and it says ‘Laura, 35, mixed-race’, ‘Helen, 34, biracial’ or ‘Sarah, 36, black’ — because there was a time when those were the only roles I could audition for. The lead roles would never say white. If they said nothing, you knew they were white. It’s only recently that they’ve knocked all of that out, and just gone ‘Laura, 36’. If people start to say that men have to play men’s roles and straight women have to play straight women’s roles, and black people — I’m going to lose a lot of jobs.

“We’re actors, we’re supposed to be pretending to be other people. We’re not supposed to be pretending to be ourselves, otherwise we’d be on Real Housewives of Beverly Hills. I don’t want to play myself. I’m not that interesting a person, Henry. I’m really boring. I read, and I walk the dog, and I make lemon drizzle.” She laughs. “I want to play other people! I want to play people who kill people and people on a revenge mission, I want to play astronauts and deep sea divers, I want to kick doors in and be like, ‘Hands up!’”

This doesn’t stop her from being profoundly affected by the roles she plays. “Your brain is so smart and knows you’re pretending to be someone. But your body does not know you’re pretending. Your body is full of muscle memory. You cry for half of the day, each day, in deep grief. I’m not a method actor so I don’t need to reproduce pain in myself. But I use substitution so I do need to get in the right headspace.”

In The Beast Must Die, which was released on the streaming service Britbox earlier this year, Jumbo’s character lost her son. During breaks in filming, she would play with her actual son and feel guilty that her character Frances could not play with her fictional child. “It was the weirdest feeling,” says Jumbo. “I did have to have a couple of sessions with my therapist, because I felt so angry for her.”

She finds theatre “less disturbing”, thanks to the lengthy preparation and the close team, who act as a support network. “First week of Shakespeare rehearsals, you do a lot of sitting round and talking . . . You don’t get six weeks of rehearsals for TV. If you’re lucky, you get half a day. You have to show up with the goods and go. Cry now. Get raped now.”

So she looks to maintain “one foot outside” the character. “If two feet are inside the character, you get these crazy stories about people throwing tea at assistants and screaming at everyone.”

Is she tempted to put both feet in, to fly closer to the sun? “You have to know where your line is. I know exactly where my line is, because I’ve dealt with my own mental health over the years . . . I know very firmly how far I can go before it’s too far. I think some people enjoy going too far.”

When the pandemic hit, a part of her was “elated” at the chance of a break. “Sometimes I feel like [I’m] on a train that’s going really fast, and it’s an awesome train, there’s people I know in every carriage, and I just keep moving through carriage to carriage [saying], ‘I’ll be back to talk to you.’ Like when you have a massive wedding and you don’t really get to speak to anybody.” The rest never came, she is too in demand. She is now booked up for another year and more. The train hurtles on, and with it, Jumbo’s quiet battle to be the driver, not simply a passenger.

At the end of our interview, she tells me she hadn’t intended to mention the incident with the wig on The Good Fight. “I had an absolutely amazing time working on both shows. I loved the team, it was a fantastic place to learn the craft of making brilliant TV . . . Becoming a parent just forced me to confront my priorities somewhat and those priorities happened to clash with those of the show.”

Nonetheless, the incident taught her the power of no. “Sometimes the more you say no, the more people want you. I don’t kick up a fuss about 90 per cent of stuff. I don’t care about somebody bringing me the wrong coffee, about wearing a skirt that I’m not that bothered about. I don’t care even about other actors treating me like shit because that will only last so long . . . But when my heart really cares about something, I will not back down, because I’m right. And I was right.”

“Hamlet” runs from September 27 to November 13 at the Young Vic, and will be streamed online October 28-30.

Portraits by Delali Ayivi. Set Design by Bubby Nurse.

Movement: Jane Jasmin Saword. Hair and make-up: Emma White Turle. Fashion and Set Assistant: Lottie Laversuch.

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