Uzo Aduba In Treatment: How unusual show confused its star

She’s played challenging roles from prisoner “Crazy Eyes” to feminist Shirley Chisholm, but this star’s latest role sees her as never before.

Everyone in Los Angeles is in therapy — especially the actors — but one Hollywood star is going deeper than most as she peels back the layers of the human psyche in her biggest role yet.

Uzo Aduba is known for playing challenging characters, from mentally ill prisoner Suzanne “Crazy Eyes” Moore in Orange Is The New Black to feminist icon Shirley Chisholm in Mrs America, but her latest project sees her as someone much closer to herself.

The actress gives a nuanced performance as warm, astute therapist Dr Brooke Taylor in season four of the Emmy-winning HBO drama In Treatment, replacing Gabriel Byrne as Dr Paul Weston in the central role.

It’s her first lead role in a television series, and an exceptionally tough one, since the unusual format sees each episode unfold as an intense, emotional conversation between Brooke and one of three patients.

“When the script came to me and I saw it was only two people the whole time, I was like ‘well where’s everybody else?’” says Aduba of the hit drama, which returns on May 23, a decade after the season three finale.

“Where’s the driving thing? We just sit down and talk? And I was like, ‘I need to watch this for a second just to understand what is happening, how this works.’”

The new season sees the action transplanted from New York to Los Angeles, where Brooke counsels three diverse patients from her luxurious home after the pandemic closed her office — while dealing with her own trauma.

Uzo Aduba in her first lead role in a TV series in season 4 of award-winning psychoanalysis drama In Treatment.

RELATED: We haven’t seen Angelina like this in years

The 40-year-old compares the format to the two-hander Frost/Nixon, a play based on UK broadcaster David Frost’s 1977 interviews with disgraced US President Richard Nixon that became an acclaimed 2008 movie.

Speaking via Zoom, she explains: “It’s so much bodywork when you’re acting, whether it’s a play or TV show, movie, you know that you have all this space.

“It was really interesting to find who Brooke was, how does she exist, in a room with only this chair as her playground.

“You can communicate and converse with the person just with your hands and your feet and then your head tilt, and I started to start to establish a vocabulary for her in the chair.”

Every fourth episode focuses on Brooke alone, which Aduba describes as a “thrilling” opportunity to move around and discover “a pretty physical” character.

The therapist is dealing with grief after her father’s death — a familiar pain for Aduba, who lost her mother last November just 10 days before she travelled from New York to LA to start filming In Treatment.

The 40-year-old says she felt ‘so much of myself’ in her character, empathetic LA therapist Dr Brooke Taylor.

RELATED: Show’s extreme violence hard to stomach

Her mother was a constant supportive presence as Aduba scooped numerous awards following her electric in her breakthrough role as “Crazy Eyes” in OITNB in 2013.

Having appeared on Broadway and in TV series Blue Bloods, she won an Emmy for best guest actress in a comedy series in 2014 and best supporting actress in a drama series in 2015 and 2017. In 2020, she won another best supporting actress Emmy for her subtle performance as politician Shirley Chisholm in Mrs America.

The actress — who is soon to appear in Amazon Prime anthology series Solos — says In Treatment gave her “deeper, richer respect” for the work of therapists, who act as “empty container” while “simultaneously managing their own life circumstances”.

Executive producer Josh Allen, producer of musical drama Empire, says the show’s creators specifically wanted a black woman in the role, describing the stigma he was conscious of when he sought therapy as a black man. Only around four per cent of therapists in the US are black.

Nigerian-American Aduba says it was “exciting to be able to occupy space” in the role.

“We’ve had stories told about mental health before. I’ve been on the opposite end of that discussion before, but rarely have we seen that conversation happen with someone like myself as a vessel for helping to facilitate that story.

“My hope more than anything, is that that serves as a conversation starter, a catalyst of some kind, for people of colour, not only to see themselves as patients, but also as therapists.”

To prepare for the role, Aduba researched different forms of treatment to see how a “self-disclosure” psychotherapist would behave. She spoke with a psychotherapist friend about how to “arrive without judgment” and listen with empathy.

It’s an approach that gets under the skin of the “beautiful scattering” of issues among the complicated patients her character works with in the show — a care worker for a wealthy family who has been diagnosed as bipolar, a young black woman who believes she’s a sex addict and a manipulative white-collar criminal who must attend the sessions as a condition of his release.

Aduba has called it “easily one of the hardest jobs I’ve ever had”, but it’s clear she’s more than up to the task.

“This was the first time I was working on a role where I just feel so much of myself in her,” she says. “And so it made it harder to leave her at the end of the day. I’m not sure I was successful every time, if I’m being honest, leaving her at a stage, and not bringing her back to my house, but I do think though, that was needed for this project.”

In Treatment launches on Foxtel’s Fox Showcase on Thursday, June 3 at 8.30pm.