Cush Jumbo: “I used to fill Pret sandwiches on the night shift just to pay the rent”

“I’ve competed on that floor,” says Cush Jumbo about the Rivoli Ballroom in Brockley. Growing up in southeast London, dance fanatic Jumbo took ballroom and Latin lessons here, having bartered with her parents to add the new discipline to her already full dance card of ballet, tap and jazz. A couple of doors down is her primary school, and two of her childhood homes are a few streets away. She’s thrilled about the serendipity of us shooting the cover of our performance issue here: “There’s nothing like going back somewhere as an adult where you felt happy as a kid.”

We’re talking in the Donmar Warehouse’s offices prior to Jumbo’s evening performance of the rave-reviewed Macbeth, for which she’s done eight performances a week since December last year. Her days begin at 6.45am, when her five-year-old son Max wakes up, and finish at 1am, when she gets back from the theatre to her home on the south coast. Post-school drop-off, her pre-show hours are also packed. Today she’s been doing a talk at her alma mater The Brit School (a place she credits with getting her into the business and is now a trustee for), and she’s also in the midst of launching Criminal Record – the Apple TV+ show that topped the streamer’s chart on its release in January – for which there are interviews and screenings and press appearances to attend. Multi-tasking, however, is nothing new to the multi-hyphenate actress, writer, producer and creator.

“I’m always spinning plates,” smiles Jumbo, over a coffee. “I’m never not doing something. I’m a bit of a swan, constantly paddling beneath the surface, because I’ve always had to be that way.”

With a slew of critically acclaimed roles and an OBE for services to drama, it’s hard to believe that Jumbo wasn’t always as in demand as she is now. But rewind just over a decade and she was on the brink of giving up on acting. In the years following her graduation from the Central School of Speech and Drama, the work was slow to come and she relied on other jobs to support herself.

“Living in London is so much harder now than it was then, but I worked three jobs,” she says. “I used to waitress, I used to work in a bar, I used to teach, I used to clean, I used to fill Pret sandwiches on the night shift just to pay the rent. It was really hard, and sometimes quite depressing because acting was the only job I ever wanted to do, and I was good at it, but I couldn’t make ends meet from it. Then it restricts the rest of your life because you can’t go on holiday or go to the pub, and that has an effect on your psyche after a while.

“I got to the point of not wanting to do it anymore, not because I didn’t love it, but because my mental health was deteriorating from that feeling of failure, even though I wasn’t a failure.”

She lined up a place on a teaching course at Greenwich University (side note: from a short time in Jumbo’s company, I’m confident she would have made an inspiring teacher), but her mum encouraged her to write and perform one last show, so that she’d finish her acting career on a positive note. Jumbo took her advice and wrote Josephine and I, a one-woman show about the French performer Josephine Baker.

“I’m a bit of a nerd about performance and old musicals and used to watch the ones they put on at weekends on Channel 4,” she says. “I loved them but was always aware that none of the leading ladies looked like me. Then one day they showed Zouzou and I was, like…” (here Jumbo grabs the table enthusiastically) “…that woman is brown. I started collecting anything I could about her.”

For Josephine and I, Jumbo dug out her collection, wrote the show and put it on “for about fifty quid” at the Etcetera Theatre above the Oxford Arms on Camden High Street. Word got out, an Evening Standard award followed, and before long it had transferred to New York, where a backstage meeting with Christine Baranski led to a recurring role in the American drama The Good Wife and its spin-off, The Good Fight. She never took up the teaching place, instead living in New York for several years as she filmed the show. But, says Jumbo, the experience means that she now never waits for the phone to ring and is always proactive about finding projects that interest her. “I never want to feel out of control in my career again,” she says firmly.

This brings us neatly to Criminal Record, a project that she pitched to Apple TV+ along with co-star Peter Capaldi, whom she originally met on the set of Torchwood. The superb East London-set police drama about Jumbo’s June Lenker trying to reopen a closed case and facing opposition from Capaldi’s old-guard detective – the case’s original investigating officer – is both a taut thriller and an indictment of systemic racism, featuring two actors at the top of their games. To facilitate their abrasive on-screen relationship, the real-life friends avoided rehearsing together so they couldn’t predict the other’s reactions in takes, and the tension stretches to the last scene of the finale. You’re left feeling that there’s plenty more to explore between these two characters and, while Jumbo is tight-lipped today about whether the series is returning for a second season, Apple TV+ would be foolish not to snap it up.

But as ever, there are plenty of other projects on the bubble, including a couple more she can’t announce yet. “I’m always writing stuff,” she says. Currently, there’s a show she’s developing with Sony about a woman with post-partum psychosis and, coming up, an inclusive family play, Bear Snores On, showing in Regent’s Park this Easter. “When I bought the rights to the book, the author was really moved that I wanted to make a piece of theatre out of it,” she says. “She said people contact her constantly about it being special to neurodiverse children and children with special educational needs. This resonated with me because my son has auditory processing needs, and I wanted to make a piece of theatre that was for every child to come to.”

On the more intense end of the theatre spectrum, when we meet, Jumbo has three weeks left at the Donmar as Lady Macbeth, opposite David Tennant’s Scottish King. It’s a meta, multi-media experience, where the audience wear headphones as they watch, and reviews have been universally positive. She says she will feel bereft at the end of the run: “When David contacted me about it, I thought it sounded amazing. I’ve worked with him before and he’s fantastic. It was a great opportunity.”

Having performed in several of the Bard’s productions now, no one is more surprised than Jumbo to have found joy in Shakespeare, firstly because she “hated” him at GCSE level, and secondly because she was told at drama school that “realistically you probably won’t do a lot of classical theatre,” she says with a raised eyebrow at the subtext contained within that ‘realistically’. In 2013 she was nominated for an Olivier as Mark Antony in Julius Caesar and in 2022 she won one for her portrayal of Hamlet.

“I try my best to not go more than two years without going on stage,” she says today. “It is a muscle and you have to exercise it. You do start to get the fear if you don’t go back for a long time. I also think for me it feels like home when I’m there and I think it makes my TV and film work better. I’ll do theatre until I can’t remember words anymore.”

Right now, she needs to get ready for the evening’s show, and she’s back at The Brit School tomorrow morning. “Before, I’d be like, ‘This could be the last time I work’,” she says of her busy workload. “But now I’m thinking, ‘I’ve got that going on, that’s developing, how’s that going over there?’ There aren’t enough hours in the day, to be honest, but I love it.”

Criminal Record is streaming on Apple TV+ now. Bear Snores On runs from 23 March to 21 April at Regent’s Park Open Air Theatre 

Jumbo’s London

It’s been there for ages, but one of my favourite places to eat is Balthazar. It’s right in the middle of theatre district and always buzzy and open late if I want to eat after the show.

My go-to drink is a very dirty vodka martini – cold glass, well shaken. There’s a bar in the Corinthia hotel that I like, and I’ll have one there or at Claridge’s.

Peckham-slash-East Dulwich has everything and it’s easy to get into town. Plus, you’re basically going to have a good time at any pub in southeast London, because they still look like pubs. The Great Exhibition pub on Crystal Palace Road is one of my favourites. It does a really good roast, and is dog and kid friendly.

The V&A is one of my favourite museums. I recently went to see the Diva exhibition there [on until 7 April]. I’m actually in the museum theatre section somewhere, I think. There’s an archive of the production of Julius Caesar [Cush played Mark Antony] in there.

I love taking my son to outdoor cinemas at places like Somerset House, and I love the South Bank. The number of events that are on during the summer around there mean that it’s lovely to bring your kid along.