Uzo Aduba Gives Voice to Hidden Figures

In five seasons of “Orange Is the New Black,” Suzanne Warren, aka Crazy Eyes, has rarely minced words, spewing unvarnished reality checks at her fellow Litchfield Penitentiary inmates.

“What I learned very early is that Suzanne is truth staring back at you,” said Uzo Aduba, who has earned two Emmys playing the character (making her the only actor since Ed Asner to win for the same role in both the comedy and drama categories). “And the truth hurts, and it’s hard to say.”

So when Jenji Kohan, the show’s creator, decided to mine the even darker perils of prison, she called on Suzanne to light the way.

Season 6, out on Netflix on Friday, follows 10 inmates from Litchfield’s minimum-security side, or what they called “camp,” into maximum security after the fifth-season riot that left two correction officers dead. As the horrors unfold, the mentally ill Suzanne — off her meds and in isolation — clicks across the channels on an imaginary TV where her cohorts star in demented children’s shows, a boxing match and even a “Jeopardy!” episode. Then Suzanne herself transforms into Dorothy, complete with ruby sneakers, in a “Wizard of Oz” scene, and we’re off to meet the men and women behind the curtain of the prison-industrial complex.

In an interview at The New York Times, Aduba, 37 — nearly unrecognizable out of her “Orange” costume, save for the gap in her smile that she told of learning to love — talked about finding Suzanne, the show’s overarching message and bringing hidden figures to life.

These are edited excerpts from the conversation.

A: Jenji has always known the story she wants to tell and just as you get comfortable, she wants to disrupt that. Just as you think you understand what prison is, she introduces privatization and the systematic constructs that keep people mentally, emotionally, socioeconomically and racially imprisoned. She woos you into this delightful thing, and then it’s like: “No no no no no, we’re having a larger, greater conversation, and it’s not a conversation for the characters. It’s a conversation for you, the audience. These are the facts and what are you going to do about it?”

A: I found her voice Season 1 in one of the stage directions. They had described her as being innocent like a child, except children aren’t scary. And I had a flash in my mind of a woman holding a sledgehammer in one hand and sucking on a pacifier. And as I continued to grow to know her, it was an innocence, and the purity of that actual word. It’s not just that she hasn’t experienced things. It means that even when she makes choices that we view to be poor, there is no malice, there is no calculation, there is no intention ever of harming anyone. It is strictly to protect that which she loves.

A: I grew up in a small, New England town where I was one of a handful of black kids. And as proud of a home as I grew up in, when you’re a teenager and you don’t want anything but to have crushes, and clothing things are a priority, if the desired option is blond-haired blue-eyed, or brown-haired green-eyed, somewhere along the way you might think that the antithesis must be ugly. That’s an impression that’s left on millions of young women of color. So that feeling that my creator could hear that, and wanted to give that space to be said, was just incredibly satisfying. For myself, Uzo, I was feeling that I was saying it to not only Suzanne but to all the Uzos that were, are or will be: “Your skin is beautiful.”

A: It’s never been given, and I like it because it umbrellas so many people who are battling mental illness. And I also like it because I don’t think we’ve cracked ground solidly on the subject of mental illness, and keeping it in that space allows for a larger conversation about civil rights and how we treat people.

A: She was the first woman to play in the Negro leagues, and she’s one of the few women to have ever played in Major League Baseball. They originally did it as a stunt, but it turned out she could get hits and was scoring and was a useful player on the field. And the story is about that. It’s watching a woman in a man’s world, a black woman in a very segregated Jim Crow America, a woman who didn’t know that she was advocating in any way, whose very existence was revolutionary.

As I became more and more clear in my art-making, I realized that the stories I wanted to tell were the stories of the missing, the people we never get to hear about and should. So many women have been written out of history, and there are more corners and moments than Florence Nightingale and Sojourner Truth. How could I have never heard of these women? So [to play Toni Stone] was exciting for me. I thought, this is amazing. And I’m glad that she gets to live again.