FROM THE GREAT BEYOND
Actress wins over critics with Lady in the Lake role
Before the première of Lady in the Lake last month, Moses Ingram swears she'd been pretty Zen about her first starring role: “I was fine. I was fine. I was fine.”
Production on the '60s-set mystery wrapped two years ago. The Apple TV+ project, set in Ingram's native Baltimore, has been waiting patiently in the back of her mind ever since. It hit her just moments before she stepped onto the red carpet this month. “Oh,” says the 30-year-old actress. “People are going to watch it.”
The anxiety, the nagging tug for approval, the industry's reaction, the folks back in West Baltimore — all that swam around her stomach. A shot of Jack quelled the tidal wave of nerves. For a time.
“I have a different sense of care around” this series, Ingram says. “It's just special. It is home, you know.” She's curled in the corner of a sofa after a photo shoot, dressed in grey sweats and a fuzzy sweater, exhausted but reflective.
To put this rung of her climb into perspective, Ingram asks whether I've listened to rapper J. Cole's 2014 Forest Hills Drive. It didn't matter to Cole, says Ingram, whether he won a Grammy (he didn't) or whether anyone loved it. “He knew he made some of the best stuff of his life up to that point. And I feel like that. I really do.”
Ingram has been stacking up knockout performances since her 2020 turn in The Queen's Gambit (as Jolene, the tough and rock-solid friend of Anya Taylor-joy's chess prodigy). Now she's straddling the line between supporting jaw-dropper and prestige-drama star. But there's still that pit in her stomach, because this project hits different.
Created by Alma Har'el and based on the Laura Lippman novel of the same name, Lady in the Lake is about two very different women — one Jewish and one Black — navigating the seedy underbelly of Charm City circa 1966. But at its core, the story criss-crosses race, capitalism, patriarchy, parenthood, the very definition of storytelling and the cost of dreaming outside the lines.
Natalie Portman co-stars as Maddie Schwartz (née Morgenstern), a Jewish housewife who goes nuclear on her nuclear family, blowing up her trad-wife life to fulfil her high school dream of becoming a reporter.
Ingram plays Cleo Johnson, a Black mother of two whose dreams of overcoming her stifling circumstances are repeatedly cut short.
Narrating the series from the great beyond, Cleo explains that she was punished for wanting more. The women's lives collide when Maddie attempts to solve Cleo's murder to earn herself a front-page byline and the respect that comes with it.
Where Portman's Maddie is uptight even as she becomes unwound, Ingram's Cleo is chameleonlike, smoothly code-switching across Baltimore's Black social strata.
“I could just feel it immediately,” Ingram says of her connection to Cleo.
“There's this thing that we say, `Some things you get free.'” She didn't have to reach far to access Cleo's hunger and drive. “Cleo is a woman who dreamt big, but life has a real way of sticking it to you sometimes, you know?”
Playwright Dominique Morisseau witnessed how Ingram draws from a near-bottomless well of emotion earlier this year when the actress starred in the off-broadway production of Morisseau's Sunset Baby.
“I think she has a very old soul. There's something that's been put in her from her family that she is carrying,” the writer says.
She has “immediate access to something that's deeper than the realm that we're all playing on.”
Nearly everyone who works with Ingram sees it. What worried Ingram — what still lingers in her mind — was even making it into the room.
It wasn't supposed to be Moses Ingram in Lady in the Lake. Lupita Nyong'o originally had the role but had to bow out because of logistical concerns. Ingram auditioned while on another Apple TV+ production filming in Toronto. Behind the scenes, the creative team could not agree on Nyong 'o's replacement — until they got Ingram's tape. Shooting had already started, and she barely had time to prepare before she was needed on set.
Reviews of the seven-episode miniseries, which premièred July 19, have been split. Har'el's adaptation is heavy on mood, bold choices and symbolism, with a plot that bobs and weaves in a way that can feel frustrating. But what critics do agree on is that Ingram's performance stands out.
The Hollywood Reporter called Ingram “fierce and compelling.” Time wrote that the actress' “layered performance captures the character's vulnerability, as well as her intelligence and grit.” The Washington Post praised her “grounded brilliance and restraint.”
As a senior at Baltimore School for the Arts, Ingram felt adrift. She'd dreamt of attending Howard University, but even with financial assistance, she still couldn't afford it. So instead she got an associate's degree from Baltimore City Community College. The goal was to break into regional theatre.
“But it's like a club,” she says, a very exclusive club. For years she worked odd jobs and kept auditioning. It wasn't until she got into Yale's drama school in 2016 that TV and film work seemed like a real possibility.