Cush Jumbo: ‘I didn’t come from a place where we could afford to pay for anything’

Cush Jumbo was born in September 1985 in London. She attended the BRIT School in Croydon, followed by an acting course at Central School of Speech and Drama. She has been nominated for two Olivier Awards: her first was for Phyllida Lloyd’s all-female Julius Caesar at the Donmar in 2012, when she played Mark Antony, and her second was for the role of Hamlet at the Young Vic in 2021. She has also won a Critics’ Circle Theatre Award, UK Theatre Award, Evening Standard Theatre Award, for her 2021 performance in the title role of Hamlet. On screen, she is best known for roles in The Good Wife and Criminal Record.

In her Letter to My Younger Self, Jumbo looks back at getting her start in acting, writing her debut play Josephine & I and actors she has worked with.

I’m one of six children. I think part of the reason why I wanted to be an actor was I probably got more attention than at home. There just wasn’t time. My parents loved me very much, but when you’re a gang of children you’re striving to be seen. So I was on stage from when I was four or five years old. I enjoy it so much now because I essentially get to be like a child in a family – I don’t have to pick what I wear, I don’t even have to pick what I say. And I love working in a crew, that’s probably to do with how I grew up as well.

My dad’s Nigerian, my mum’s from Scunthorpe. Neither of them was from London. But London became a big mixture of people that just loved each other and loved each other’s cultures. You could be having pie and mash on that corner then a Jamaican patty over the road. You don’t think about this stuff till you get older, but I was presented with a multitude of characters growing up that probably went into my acting kit bag. So I don’t have any fear of playing a man in Shakespeare or putting on crinoline and doing something classical. I’m a bit of a chameleon. There seems to be a generation of us around my age – musicians, writers, actors – from South London. I think it is to do with the melting pot that happened there in the ’70s and ’80s. 

Everything I did until 16 was part of a youth club, a free scheme or the Arts Council. I didn’t come from a place where we could afford to pay for anything. And my primary school [Adamsrill, in Lewisham] was amazing. It had a music assembly every week, we all got to play an instrument, we all had drama. So many things we don’t have in schools any more. By 16, I was going to the Brit School in Croydon – the only free performing arts school in the country. I hadn’t had any idea until I got there that you could actually do this as a job. Getting taught by practitioner teachers, being surrounded by makers and it all being free was huge for me. I was thinking about going to drama school. But I hadn’t even known what a drama school was the year before.

At 16, I realised that Shakespeare was also for me. At secondary school, I’d thought I wasn’t smart enough or didn’t look right to be able to touch it. But that year I was in A Midsummer Night’s Dream and we were encouraged to look at Shakespearean language as just storytelling. I realised it was for me as well… which ended up being quite important. 

I used to look for people in film and television and on stage that looked like me. Because back then, there weren’t that many. So I really loved Thandie [now known as Thandiwe] Newton and Sophie Okonedo. When I saw actresses like that, I thought, there’s something for me out there. But they were so few and far between. 

I would tell my younger self you are good enough. So much of who you are as a teenager has an echoing effect on the rest of your life. There’s so much change. And you have so many questions about who you should be. We like to think that when we hit 21 we’re fine. But as we’re all realising in therapy into our 30s or 40s, we are still dealing with these small versions of ourselves. I often feel like I’m sitting with either child or teenage versions of myself. And I want to put my hand on her shoulder and say, you’re perfect just the way you are. There’s only one of you, so concentrate on being the perfect one of you, rather than worrying that you’re not like everybody else.

Read more:

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I was an incredibly serious and driven teenager. I’d say, you’re going to miss out by not laughing a bit more – there’ll be plenty to worry about when you have a mortgage to pay. But if I told her about my career, she’d turn to me and say ‘… and that’s why we were so driven and hard-working!’ And she’s right. You have to work hard to do this job. It doesn’t come from nowhere. You have to sacrifice a bunch of stuff. So you’ll never catch me taking it for granted or allowing other people to take it for granted that work with me. I’m quite strict about that.

I didn’t live in a world where I was wishing somebody was doing an all-female Shakespeare. Or wished there was a black girl leading and exec-producing her own show on Apple TV. I lived in a world where, if I was so lucky to be given the opportunity to hold that spear in the background, I’d be the best damn spear carrier there ever was. And I would start from that perspective and then work forwards.

I wrote Josephine and I out of utter desperation. I wasn’t from a family in the business. I was doing four or five waitressing or bar jobs to pay my rent in New Cross. That is exhausting when you’re auditioning during the day. So I didn’t come out of drama school and shoot off into the stars. I got work, but it wasn’t going in the direction I wanted. The parts just weren’t available. So I wrote the show to do something for myself that allowed me to actually perform – because I was feeling stilted and trapped. I’d decided I was going to quit acting that year. I was 24 and the inability to do the work I’d been wanting since I was so young was affecting my mental health. The suggestion to write the show came from my mum. I’d always been interested in Josephine Baker, so with my savings, I booked a pub theatre in Camden that had 12 seats. The idea was to put it on for three nights for myself, then I had a place to start on a PGCE course at Greenwich University that September. But that didn’t happen because the show just exploded. 

When you’re a teenager and want to be an actor, there are a couple of things you dream about. The first time your real name, the one that belongs to you, is in a credit going up the screen is incredible. Another is someone writing a review about you. The night we opened the Josephine Baker show in New York, we sat in the Bowery Hotel till 1am for the reviews. And Ben Brantley wrote this long New York Times review all about me that I still have framed in my house. It makes me emotional thinking about it. I’m from Lewisham – how was I in New York, which for theatre actors is where the church is, you know, sitting with a martini, reading that review in the paper? I could relive that day forever.

There was always something in me that enjoyed the idea of being able to speak all the words in Shakespeare, as opposed to just the female characters. For my younger self, getting to work with Phyllida Lloyd and look at how your performance can be impacted by putting the words through a different body would be right up her street. But I’m still not sure she would believe me if I’d said she was going to play Hamlet, or Mark Antony in Julius Caesar. Back then that just didn’t happen. It would blow her mind.

I have worked with so many more amazing people than horrible people. I feel like I’ve been gifted people like Phyllida, who has been an incredible mentor, Peter Capaldi, Hugh Jackman, Julianna Margulies, Christine Baranski. Just watching them breathe, you learn something. And it’s not just in their work, but the way they are as human beings. Being a kind human being, you can change the whole vibe of a set. That also tends to lead on to another job and another job. So there’s absolutely no reason to be an asshole. Ever. 

Oh, dear lord, my younger self was a mess. She was no Casanova, that’s for sure. On relationships, I would tell her to take her time, and that boys are essentially dicks for quite a long time. But they eventually ripen up, although some never do. I’m joking, but I was a romantic – I think I’m still a romantic – and grew up watching Gene Kelly musicals thinking there were men out there like that. Life is not that perfect. But that’s the creative mind. We are romantic people. So I’d tell her to concentrate on yourself, but love is part of life and you shouldn’t shy away from it. You think every heartbreak is going to be the end of your life, but you will be fine. And heartbreak is good – it really helps with acting. Or writing albums if you’re Adele.

Criminal Record season two is on Apple TV, with new episodes every Wednesday until 10 June

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