6 minute read
IN THE ROOM WITH
on South African soap opera “Scandal!” and in her leading role as Winnie on “Is’Thunzi”; for the latter, she received two nominations for best performance by an actress at the International Emmy Awards.
Her “Underground Railroad” audition came in 2018, and Mbedu didn’t think she had a chance. “I don’t have the accent,” she told herself at the time. “But perform, give it your all, and just hope that you will be in the archives, or you will be in the back of the minds of the casting director for other productions that they have coming up.”
After weeks of acting preparation, a deep dive into Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer Prize–winning source material and her own research, and two callbacks, she was in the room with Jenkins. “I pride myself [on] being directable,” Mbedu says of the experience. “You do the preparation, but be open to being directed. So with Barry and the test shoot, he was in the room, and we had four scenes, but we did them over and over in different ways. He’d give notes here, notes there. And at some point, he looked at me, and he’s like, ‘I’m not giving you notes and making you do it over again because you’re not giving me what I want; I just want to see your range.’ ”
Cora was hers. To prepare for the limited series (which recently garnered seven Emmy nominations), Mbedu overprepared. She remembers reading the book five times by the end of filming, and she listened to hours of testimonials to hear the unvarnished stories they were bringing to the screen for the first time. “What I knew of the enslaved body in America is the little that they tell us in schools, and which they quickly glaze past,” she says. “And then it’s what Hollywood has produced and shown us.”
The world of “The Underground Railroad” was something new. Language was the biggest piece, which she connected to some folks back in her home of South Africa. “Whenever we watch stories of the enslaved people, they speak a very fluent English; it just flows. Listening to the audio and reading the testimonials, it was really, really broken English that sometimes did not make sense to me.” Eventually, it “got to a point where I said to Barry, ‘How do we stay true to the characters and the essence of who they are without completely going all the way to the point where we would need subtitles to tell the story?’ ”
She incorporated that history into her acting through voice movement therapy. “It helps you track trauma and tell the story of who you are through your vocal journey. There are certain things, as you’re growing up, that affect your voice because of life experiences. With Cora, that became really, really important to me. She’s someone who was abandoned by her mother. She was also gang raped on the plantation. The same people who gang raped her then spread rumors and lies about her, saying that she sleeps with animals, she howls at the moon, she’s a strange person. She was ostracized within her own community. We see that whatever chaos, whatever trauma, whatever it is that she has experienced is entirely within her. She is isolated—constantly within herself. Whatever world she imagines, she has to keep within herself. And so, for me, it became important to highlight and track what she sounds like when she does eventually open her mouth. What does that chaos and trauma and that life experience sound like for someone who is constantly quiet? She is not one who sounds like the rest of her community, because she does not interact with her community as often as everybody else interacts and connects with each other.”
As a Black woman, Mbedu says just existing in her own body connects her to Cora. The series dedicated itself to exploring the “direct parallels between what happened in the 1800s and life today,” but
there’s still an even deeper history that connects the actor to this character.
“Cora and I were orphaned at a young age,” she reflects. “I lost my mother at the age of 4. When it happened, I didn’t understand what was happening. One day, my mother was here. The next, she was in a casket, and I was telling her to wake up, but she didn’t wake up. Whereas with Cora, she woke up one day, and her mother was just gone. There were no goodbyes. And, you know, life changed after that. I then went on to lose a number of people in my life. Mentally, I resolved to keep people at a distance because I was like: People leave.”
It was originally Jenkins who opened Mbedu’s eyes to these parallels. Through conversations with him, she was able to harness that power in her performance, which she ultimately found to be healing. “With me and
Cora and I were orphaned at a young age…. With me and [my character], going through what she went through, I held those parts in me as well, where it’s like: You don’t have to live like this. You don’t have to keep people at arm’s length. You don’t have to die inside alone.
It was one of many components of the project that took her by surprise. Preparation is always key prior to filming, but on set, like in the audition room, Mbedu is “just throwing all of it away. I don’t come into the moment with preconceived notions; I allow the character to just breathe, and [I also trust] fully in Barry, who showed me at the test shoot that he can get what he needs from me in any way; there’s no need for me to resist him. He told me at the very beginning that he doesn’t direct the first take; he lets you make an offer, and then he guides you from there. There was a freedom in that where I can play; I can let the character fully realize itself without me having to have the right answers, because Barry will guide me from that.”
As Mbedu noted in regards to her own limited education of “the enslaved body in America,” slave stories have circulated around Hollywood for decades. And many people, Black folks included, have expressed exhaustion with rehashings of this deep trauma for what appears to be white audiences and awards shows. However, “The Underground Railroad” hits differently from that very first frame. It doesn’t feel like the stories that came before it, perhaps because the gaze behind the camera is one of understanding—it’s Black, and it chooses to focus on the humanity of its characters rather than just the horrific acts inflicted upon them. It’s a brutal depiction and a heartbreaking story, but in the end, one Mbedu believes is necessary to share today.
“[By] daring to tell people to stop telling [these] stories, we’re essentially erasing the past, and we are giving those who have the confidence and the boldness to tell us to get over it because it happened such a long time ago ammunition,” she says.
