Harsh mums should ‘back off’ says The Good Fight star Cush Jumbo
Know-all mums should back off from judging their peers says actor and new mum Cush Jumbo
Cush Jumbo never once wavered from her dream of playing make believe for a living — even if she grew up without seeing women of colour in major roles on the television shows she watched and the movies she devoured.
The 33-year-old Brit, who plays Lucca Quinn on The Good Fight — the popular spin-off to the long-running legal drama The Good Wife — is the daughter of a Nigerian father and an English mother.
As the only one of six children with song and dance running through her blood her parents used to tease her that she must be from more famous parents.
“I’m one of these very strange fish who can’t remember ever wanting to do anything else but be an actor,” she says. “My parents used to say they thought Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers had left me on the doorstep.
“When I was a kid there weren’t a lot of people on UK television that looked like me that were playing the lead role — but then there weren’t a lot of women either,” she adds.
Jumbo was at acting school when The Good Wife first aired on British television and immediately took to the diversity of the show.
“One of the reasons I got so attached to The Good Wife when I was studying in England was because I saw women playing roles, the kind of roles that I wanted to play when I graduated drama school that didn’t actually exist on television in the UK at that time,” she says.
Years later, after recurring roles in television and on the stage, she would finally get a chance to work on The Good Wife, although it would be the show’s final season.
Cast as Lucca Quinn, a bright, straight-talking bond lawyer who quickly wins over the show’s main protagonist Alicia Florrick (Julianna Margulies), Jumbo soon became a favourite of the series.
But after seven seasons, husband and wife creators Robert and Michelle King decided it was the right time to pull the plug and Jumbo packed up and prepared to move back home to the UK. But then the phone call came about the spin-off.
“As far as anybody knew the show was completely ending and that was the end of The Good Wife and I had felt very lucky that I got to do one season,” she says.
“My apartment was all packed up and I was ready to move back to London, then literally eight weeks before we started shooting the show, the Kings called to say they would really like me to do it.”
Of course she jumped at the opportunity to keep Lucca alive, but little was known about the what the spin-off would look like, with the creators even unsure when they called on Jumbo and veteran actor Christine Baranski, who had been one of the partners in The Good Wife.
“Obviously Christine and my characters were already established so we knew who they were and we knew they were going to begin at a new law firm, but that was all we really knew,” she says.
“We knew about the African American law firm, the idea of which I found really exciting because it really hadn’t been done before, but that was really all we knew.”
Jumbo is one of three female leads in the show and one of the story arcs that carries into this third season is about Quinn returning to work after giving birth. The story very closely follows her own as she was actually pregnant while filming.
Returning to the set just four and a half months after her son Max was born, Jumbo says it’s important for mums to do what will make them the best for their children.
She’s says working makes her happy and that translates into being a better mum – even if it doesn’t feel like it when you “can go three days without seeing them awake”.
“You have to have a discussion with yourself about what’s going to make you the happier person and therefore the better parent and that this judgement that you’re putting on yourself isn’t fair,” she says.
Jumbo says other mothers can be harsh on social media and parenting forums and she urged them to back off and allow mums to make the decisions that suit their individual situation.
“I think mothers could do with being a bit nicer to each other about those decisions because everyone’s decision about being a parent is personal and whatever is best for them,” she says. “I think there’s a lot of crap out there — either pretending to be the perfect mother or judging other mothers for their decisions.”
The Good Fight screens Wednesdays, 8.30pm on SBS, and is available on SBS On Demand
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