Eleanor TurneyAs she prepares to star in a self-penned new show at the Bush, Cush Jumbo talks to Eleanor Turney about the life of an actor, not being pigeon-holed and why female characters should be allowed to get angry
Cush Jumbo is cheerful and down-to-earth about life as an actor: “I’m no Dame Helen Mirren, I’m not fielding scripts left right and centre. You need to work to pay the rent.” However, the bailiffs aren’t hammering on her door at the moment– she tells me that her agent is desperate for her to be free, because she’s been booked solidly for the past three years. She likes working, that’s the trouble: “I just love pretending to be other people. Any time I get to step outside my own skin, that’s exciting for me. You feel like a bit of a detective.”
Jumbo is not looking for ‘leading lady’ or ‘damsel in distress’ parts – she wants to push her own boundaries: “I’m quite a fan of extreme characters – I’d always much rather play the psychopathic tramp than the girl in the hot pants.” She has just finished playing Mark Anthony in Phyllida Lloyd’s all-female Julius Caesar, which has made her think about the way women act in the acting business: “I hadn’t really paid attention to the atmosphere of the rehearsal room before, because it’s always a mix of men and women. Women are always in the minority… you kind of just get used to that.” To work in an all-female cast, then, was both thought-provoking and freeing. “You don’t realise how much you censor the level of what you do; deep down you’re slightly self-conscious about the impression that you make. As women, we’re brought up from a very young age to be the nurturer, the carer, the more timid person in the room – even if you’re a confident person. We don’t sit on the tube with our legs open, taking up all the space. We’re always thinking about others because that’s how we’re brought up, that’s what we’re taught to do.”
Lloyd encouraged her cast to push the boundaries of their normal emotional range, something Jumbo is hugely enthusiastic about: “It was really interesting to be in a room where we could all experiment and nobody was self-conscious about looking sweaty, looking ugly, speaking too loud, taking up too much space or any of that stuff. It was so freeing to run around, in a tracksuit, kicking the crap out of each other. It felt like being in the playground again.” Working with Lloyd has made Jumbo think about how she approaches roles in the future, too. “It made me go into my next job with this feeling that just because you’re playing a feminine character doesn’t mean that they don’t have a spectrum like a male character has. You can’t usually go to the extremes that male characters are allowed to go to…”
Her next role is playing Josephine Baker in her own play, Josephine and I, which premieres tonight at The Bush and is directed by Lloyd. “I’ve always written, but I never thought of myself as a playwright. Josephine and I was written out of a kind of frustration at the acting work I was doing at the time. I felt a bit creatively stunted, like I wanted to have an outlet and not just wait for the phone to ring… it’s easy to feel very out control when you’re waiting for someone else to decide about you, so this felt like I was taking a bit of control of my own life and being creative in a different way.”
Having written the play, and shown the script to Lloyd, Jumbo is now starring in it, too. How is it, I wonder, rehearsing something where you are both writer and actor? “It’s been a really interesting process to be both actor and director in the room… You often have the writer in the room for a new play, but they can leave after two hours, go home, do some re-writes and come back the next day with some new material. I was in rehearsals all day, going home to do my re-writes, then learning the re-writes, then back into rehearsals again, trying to look at it as a writer. It was quite intense! The more I became the character, the more Cush the actor pushed Cush the writer out of the room, and towards the end Cush the writer came back again. It’s a hard thing to do.”
A hard thing, certainly, but an important one. This is a project that’s been on the cards for a long time and is close to Jumbo’s heart: “I’ve always been interested in Josephine Baker. I saw her in a movie when I was seven or eight and over the years kept trying to find out about her. I was a big fan of old musicals, and the only trouble with those films is that I loved all the actresses in them but none of are black, and if there are black characters then they’re always the maid or the slave. So to see a woman being the star in a movie who looks just like you was like a slap in the face.” Having written the piece, Jumbo is clearly enjoying her dual role. “There’s no need for us all to get stuck in boxes – just because you’re an actor doesn’t mean you’re not a painter or a dancer or a writer or a director.”
What, then, would she say to aspiring actors and/or writers who want to follow in her footsteps? She is blunt: “I don’t want to sugar coat the fact that this is an incredibly hard job. 85% of people in the creative industries are out of work all the time, and the other 15% work all the time. If it doesn’t come from a place of being completely obsessed with it and in love with it, it’s not for you. If you want to make a lot of money, be a lawyer. If you want to be famous, go out with a celebrity. But certainly don’t become an actor or a writer unless there is something within you that won’t let you do anything else.” It seems clear that whatever it is within Jumbo that won’t let her do anything else isn’t planning to pipe down any time soon. Off to New York in October with Julius Caesar, I ask her what the plan is after that? “I’d quite like a holiday,” she laughs.
Josephine and I is at the Bush Theatre from 12 July to 17 August. For more information or to book tickets, visit the Bush’s website.
Photos (c) Simon Kane.