Cush Jumbo interview
Cush Jumbo, presenter of this year’s Evening Standard Theatre Awards, tells Nick Curtis about her incredible years on stage
CUSH JUMBO’S attendance at the Evening Standard Theatre Awards mirrors her rise as an actress and writer. She’s been a friend’s plus-one, a nominee, the winner of the Emerging Talent Award in 2013 for her extraordinary show Josephine and I, and a presenter of an award in 2017.
This year, the Lewisham-born star of CBS legal drama The Good Fight will step into Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s shoes to present the 65th Evening Standard Theatre Awards, which will see the cream of British stage talent congregate at the London Coliseum on November 24. Jumbo was asked by Dame Anna Wintour, editor-in-chief of US Vogue, who is co-hosting the event with the Evening Standard’s proprietor, Evgeny Lebedev.
“When Anna asked me I said ‘yes’ really quickly in case she changed her mind,” smiles Jumbo. “It’s such an honour.” To succeed Waller-Bridge is “amazing, because she was the first woman to host it and our careers have been running alongside each other [Fleabag and Josephine and I, one-woman shows by then little-known writer-performers, premiered the same year].
“The Standard Awards always feel really emotive to me; when I’m in that room I’ve always felt l i ke I’m in the company of my family, even when I was an unknown person. And being a Londoner, the Standard has always been in my life.”
The event kicks off a big year for Jumbo. As well as the fourth series of The Good Fight, which will take her to New York for six months, she has a lead role in Channel 4’s psychological crime drama Deadwater Fell, alongside David Tennant in January. It’s her first British series since she quit the Brenda Blethyn vehicle Vera in 2016, finding, like many non-white actors, that she had to go to the US to find good screen roles. “It’s the first time in ages I’ve sat down and read a script that made my skin tingle,” she says of Deadwater Fell. “My character, Jess, is basically the audience’s eyes. She also wasn’t written to particularly look a certain way or be from a certain place, which always excites me because I’m just a person.”
Next July she will play Hamlet at the Young Vic, the latest intriguing advance in theatre’s attempt to address its historical gender imbalance. “I’m playing him as a man but I’m also hoping to discover the essence of what ‘man’ is now,” she says. “Is it Stormzy or Boris Johnson, a gymnast who can flip or someone up in the mountains? I don’t know, but I want to know.”
She is doing all this while parenting her 11-month-old son Maximillian, with her husband Sean Griffin, a former journalist who now works in tech. She has their initials tattooed on the inside of her fingers, where they won’t be visible to TV cameras. “It’s only when I put them together that I realise it says S&M,” Jumbo says. “Though I suppose it could be M&S…”
This annus mirabilis caps a remarkable seven-year run for Jumbo. The second of seven children born to a Nigerian father and a white Salford-born mother, both psychiatric nurses, she trained at the Brit School and Central School of Speech and Drama, and first made her mark at Manchester’s Royal Exchange. There, she was the first non-white actress ever to play Eliza Doolittle (“which is kind of f***ed up”) and won the prestigious Ian Charleson Award in 2012 for her performance as Rosalind in As You Like
I’m also hoping to discover the essence of what ‘man’ is now. Is it Stormzy or Boris Johnson?
It, directed by Greg Hersov, who will helm her Hamlet.
The same year she was cast as Mark Antony in the Donmar’s landmark all-female production of Julius Caesar, which went to New York. The next year she premiered Josephine and I, a dazzling, firecracker showcase for her acting and dancing, about a young actress who idolises the pioneering black Twenties star Josephine Baker. She played 23 characters, men and women, black and white, of all ages, and won the Emerging Talent Award.
Josephine and I proved amazingly prophetic. The central character has been offered an audition for a big US TV series and has also just discovered she is pregnant. In 2014 Jumbo went to Broadway to star opposite Hugh Jackman in Jez Butterworth’s The River. The following year, still unable to pay her rent, she took Josephine and I to New York’s Public Theater. Meryl Streep and David Schwimmer
came to see it, as did Michelle and Robert King, creators of The Good Wife. They asked her to appear in the show’s final series as tough lawyer Lucca Quinn, and boosted her role in the spinoff The Good Fight, alongside Christine Baranski. In the interim, Jumbo had got together with Sean, who she had known for years — “I never thought he fancied me” — married him seven months after they started dating, then got pregnant.
The showrunners wrote her pregnancy into The Good Fight and her character gave birth a week before she did — “a dress rehearsal”. She is clearly loved-up with Maximilian and with Sean. “He left everything behind to move to the US to support me in joining The Good Wife… you only meet a nice guy like that maybe once or twice,” she says. Later she tells me her dad gave up work to be a house-husband for 16 years. She has a family, a career and an OBE, which she will collect this week for services to drama, but there is a lot of paddling going on beneath Jumbo’s air of genial serenity.
“I completely unsubscribe from the lie that you’re able to do everything,” she says .“You absolutely can not do everything, and I try to put as much funny stuff on my Instagram about me and my baby as possible, because I think life is not perfect. At the beginning I learned about the guilt: I have this baby and I know exactly the amount of time I have to get back into shape before I have to start filming again, at a time when all you want to do is put on sweatpants and drink hot chocolate, while you try to produce milk for your child. Then feeling guilty about stopping breastfeeding, because if you don’t you’re tied to the sofa and you can’t respond to emails. And if you don’t respond to those emails the kid doesn’t eat. You’re doing that and trying to get a relationship back with your husband, when you’re both just so exhausted you can barely reach over the other side of the bed to touch each other. But the main thing I’m learning is that everything costs something, and if you make peace with the thing that it costs, it’s a lot easier.”
IN SOME ways, the 34-year-old believes motherhood may have stimulated rather than stifled her creative urge. “It’s taught me to live in the present more, because babies do. Everything is new: a paper cup, the toilet seat, the dog food they’re trying to eat…”
Alongside her acting commitments she is working on a project for the National Theatre about an 18th-century girl gang; Josephine and I is being developed for the screen; and she would really like to create a TV series here along the lines of The Good Fight, where lots of creative voices have input, and the cast and crew is roughly balanced in terms of gender and ethnicity.
“I’m a strange fish in that I’ve never fitted neatly into a box,” she says. “I know I’m an actor, I know I write, I know I make things, I know I can do classical Shakespeare and I can be a girl on a council estate. Now I’m moving into a stage where I love the work I’m doing and it’s time to affect the machine, and help other people too, because I want our industry to grow.” In the US, she says, they call her a “multi-hyphenate”, which is good, whereas a “slashie” is bad. On November 24, she can add the Evening Standard Theatre Awards gig to her list of hyphenations. She’s going to be great.
● The Evening Standard Theatre Awards in association with Michael Kors will take place on November 24 at the London Coliseum. The shortlist will be revealed in early November