To have a conversation with Laverne Cox means witnessing a work in progress, but that doesn’t mean she hasn’t liberated those who see themselves in her.
The acting powerhouse, trans activist, and speaker blossomed before television enthusiasts in the 2010s when she made her breakout performance as Sophia Burset on former Netflix prison dramedy Orange Is the New Black. As the long-running series bolstered Cox’s presence in entertainment—thus making her an icon among queer, trans, and nonbinary champions—the show also earned Cox the highly coveted Primetime Emmy Award nomination for Outstanding Guest Actress in a Comedy Series. The nod would also make Cox the first openly transgender performer to be recognized in an Emmy acting category. What followed was a prestigious run—winning a Primetime Emmy as producer (Laverne Cox Presents: The T Word), being the first transgender person on a Time magazine cover, and appearing in more than 40 film and television titles like Promising Young Woman, Bad Hair, and Inventing Anna.
“Having my breakout moment be Orange Is the New Black and then getting an Emmy nomination from the first season and then getting three subsequent nominations and having the show be critically loved and loved by the public is very rare in a career. I was probably one of the biggest beneficiaries of that gift,” Cox tells Tidal.
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She continues, “I was one of the few people very blessed on that show to be able to get the attention that I got from the press and I was able to sort of go out outside the show and monetize in ways that everybody else wasn’t able to do. So I’m really grateful, but there should be some systemic change, too, so that everyone is able to participate.”
When I sat with the 52-year-old over Zoom in mid-October, I realized that while a fresh-faced and bespectacled Cox has awareness and gratitude for her countless accolades, in this moment, she showed an openness to bare her deepest feelings. It begins with her place of origin, Mobile, Alabama, where, in the embers of her youth, Cox was a high achiever, placing self-worth in her grade school triumphs. All the while, she was frequently bullied, shared a two-bedroom apartment with her twin brother and their overworked and underpaid mother, and used dissociation to manage her trauma.
“The beautiful thing about what we as human beings do to survive...the dissociation was a survival mechanism for me,” Cox recalls about her childhood. “I’ve been thinking a lot about where I went when I dissociated, and it was my imagination. I would leave my body. I would imagine living in New York and dancing on Broadway. That was the initial dream: singing, dancing, and acting on Broadway, being on television, being a star.”
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Cox would follow that impetus ever since hearing actress Sheryl Lee Ralph’s prima donna “murder on my lip gloss” line on season six of iconic CBS sitcom Good Times. Cox admired legendary Black women artistes like soprano Leontyne Price and kept pop culture staples Fame and Solid Gold on her television rotation, fine-tuning her ambition.
“So many of those dreams have come true and now, as an adult, it has been time to process all the trauma I couldn’t process then,” Cox continues. “So what a miracle it is that I’m still alive, and what a miracle the arts were for me.”
Equally miraculous was her mother keeping her in childhood dance classes, when a teacher, Miss Ridgeway (whose name Cox recalls without hesitation), warned that the activity would turn her gay. Dance classes and choreography saved Cox, just as she was cultivating a knack for public speaking at Bethel AME Church, where she was baptized at 7.
“I didn’t even realize the time was a training ground for me to sort of do a lot of the speaking work that I do now,” she recalls.
But even as Cox found her voice enough to relocate to New York City, where she attended Marymount Manhattan College, specializing in classical ballet and acting, childhood wounds trailed her. Originally, there seemed to be a lack of resources for Cox to process the physical and verbal violence that she endured as a child other than ongoing dissociation. But the mechanism would send her back into survival mode, and in 1998, Cox chose to pursue medical treatment in the form of hormone replacement therapy, or HRT.
“That leaving my body thing that happened even before puberty was something that I also needed to do as a trans person. I didn’t understand as puberty was happening that the trauma of that was not aligned with who I was,” Cox shares while holding back tears.
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Cox’s doctor would retire the following year, and it was when she found a local community health center that she was required to attend therapy while continuing HRT. But initially, Cox had some reservations.
“I thought I was fine. I read bell hooks in college and [Michel] Foucault. I knew about intersectionality. And so, I didn’t think I needed therapy...[but] I needed therapy,” she admits.
Being in therapy allowed Cox to deepen her acting skills, and under award-winning instructor Susan Batson, she practiced emotional sense memory, where she accessed her core memories—sometimes repressed—to inform her characters.
“When I started studying with Susan and understood the power of when you can commit to the art form, create a walking, talking human being that could shift molecules, that can change the world through storytelling, I committed,” Cox affirms. “So I was like, If I commit to this process and I need to be able to access my emotional life, and I get shut down when I start to do that with memory, I have to deal with this stuff in therapy.”
Cox would often channel her traumas in acting classes and learned to distinguish her triggers so as to not delve into past circumstances too deeply. But studio sessions didn’t always go how she planned.
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“When we started doing sense memory work and I started going into childhood memories, it would shut me down,” Cox continues. “It was a class called Exer Actor, exercising your actor, and I can think of four different times where we would do sense memory work and I was literally vomiting in the class as memories were coming up. I’d be crying so hard and my body couldn’t handle it.”
There was a trash can in Batson’s class that Cox put to good use, and in going to therapy, she was able to harness neuroscience pathways to further strengthen her acting craft. Fans observe this when Cox puts her all into unforgettable characters, like OITNB’s Burset, Inventing Anna’s Kacy Duke and, more recently, the acerbic Dr. Cable in Netflix sci-fi thriller Uglies, adapted from the 2005 Scott Westerfeld novel. In preparation for the film, Cox practiced animal exercise, learning to be protective of her “cubs” (Dr. Cable’s “Pretties”) and acting within primal instincts and ferocity.
“I had been manifesting a sort of futuristic dystopian film for a while. So when the script came across my desk, I was like, Yes, manifestation works,” Cox says. “Dr. Cable is so delicious—it’s just the kind of character I wanted to play for a long time. I mean, it’s fun being the villain.”
She continues, “She believes that what she’s doing is the right thing to maintain social order to have this society that’s equal. Part of what she does is that she feels for the people that she’s in charge of and that she is manipulating, and she feels with them and she’s empathetic. That’s part of what she uses to get her way.”
In the next year, Cox will have two new projects on her résumé: her cocreated comedy series Clean Slate, which finds the actor (fictitiously) returning to Alabama, and the Jonah Hill–directed black comedy Outcome. Cox lives and breathes acting, but when she’s able to decompress, she makes space for relaxation: There’s The Blacklist and Marvel Cinematic Universe binge watches, YouTube gossip channels, a healthy shopping addiction, and close trans sisterhood.
DRESS Melitta Baumeister, EARRINGS & BRACELET Alexis Bittar
JACKET Zimmermann, EARRINGS Christina Caruso
“I finally, in my life, have a group of ride-or-die real friends who have each other’s backs,” Cox says. “We’ve been there for each other; there’s no judgment or competition. We would never let a man come between us. With dating and men in the trans community, there’s [been] overlap with some of my girlfriends unknowingly in the past. And we have never, ever let a man come between us, which I’m fucking so proud of.”
But when a man is involved, Cox reveals that romance, for her, is currently up in the air. “I’ve had this wonderful love affair over the past few years. I think we’re broken up now. I’m in a limbo situation with that.” she says. “I don’t know what the future of romance is like for me, but it’s been really great. I think because I’ve had this dream-come-true of a relationship that I might be good. I’m still human, I get lonely. But I have really great memories and I’ve had some great experiences.”
While much of Cox’s healing lives in the work she’s dedicated her life to, she still grapples with identifying measures of codependency, trauma resilience, and shame.
“My mother was emotionally abusive. We worked through all that—we’re great. She did the best she could and these things are passed down in her generationally. I thought love was abuse,” Cox confesses. “Someone actually being loving and caring—I was like, What the fuck is that? Someone being loving towards me, I would push them away, and someone being abusive to me, I would bring them closer.”
With an eager willingness to better herself through the performance and the personal, Cox defied the odds for her star to shine brightly, an incandescent glow that entertainment would otherwise be lifeless without.
“There has been and continues to be really crucial work for me to make sure that I’m reacting to an actual threat, and not something that’s from my past,” she continues. “Then when something is beautiful and wonderful, to go toward it and to embrace it and to live in it.” ❤
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