The HBO seriesIn Treatmentis back for a fourth season and this time follows Dr. Brooke Taylor (Uzo Aduba), a therapist in Los Angeles who currently has a diverse trio of patients — home health aide Eladio (Anthony Ramos), millionaire turned white-collar criminal Colin (John Benjamin Hickey), and distrustful teenager Laila (Quintessa Swindell) — for whom she’s trying to help navigate their concerns. Current social and cultural shifts permeate all of the therapy sessions while Brooke also tries to deal with complications and demons in her own life that are proving to be quite challenging.
During a virtual junket to promote the new season, Collider got the opportunity to chat 1-on-1 with Emmy Award winner Uzo Aduba about the challenge of taking this series on, the tremendous cast that was assembled, serving as a reflection for the therapy sessions, what made this experience so creatively fulfilling, the challenge of having two days per episode for the shoot, and whether she’d consider doing another season.
Collider: It’s no easy feat to make conversations in one room between two people so fascinating, and you do a fantastic job at that.
UZO ADUBA: Well, that is Jen [Schuur] and Josh [Allen], our showrunners, who wrote a great series of episodes, great series of stories, and characters that were exciting for everyone involved to play. This cast is tremendous. We have a really exceptional group. It was really tremendous to see that, through the entire company — Anthony [Ramos], John [Benjamin Hickey], Quintessa [Swindell], Charlayne [Woodard] Joel [Kinnaman] and Liza [Colón-Zayas]. Everyone was just amazing. Everyone was fantastic, so it was a real treat.
What was your reaction to this opportunity to top line a TV series for a show that’s been off TV for over a decade, and doing so during COVID? Did you need to take a minute to consider that?
ADUBA: Yes, I definitely had to take a minute to think about it and be like, “Whoa, that’s intense. What does that mean?” I was thrilled by the challenge of it. It’s a two-hander, which is like doing a play, quite honestly, every single episode, and doing it again and again, each of us with the patient-client-lover experience, and so forth. That was really exciting. I hadn’t felt really nervous, frankly, for awhile, where your stomach is doing flips and you’re going, “Okay, do I know these words?” You feel like you need to stretch or something before every episode performance. That was thrilling to think about. And then, I also think just the subject was big. It felt timely, for me anyway. It felt like something where I could be of service, in a way, through the show, and that was exciting. A show like this, that’s tackling the conversation of mental health from this vantage point, I’ve seen the conversation happen before in previous film or TV, but I’d never seen these stories tackled before through someone like myself, and I’d never seen those patients reflected back by people like the ones we got to have in our show.
RELATED:First ‘In Treatment’ Trailer Shows Uzo Aduba As the New Star of Returning Series
When you’re doing these therapy sessions, your character’s voice is always so even-keeled. As an actor, does that go against your natural instincts, to be more reactionary than that? Was it ever hard to reel that in and not react how you would react, if you had conversations like this with people?
ADUBA: Oh, definitely. Absolutely. But that’s what makes the understanding of the job so much more complex and makes you give it so much more respect. You’re dealing with a person, a human being, who does have opinions out in the world and who has thoughts about things. It’s not so much censoring yourself, but you realize very quickly that it’s not the responsibility of the therapist to insert their position on anything. It’s their responsibility to help serve as a reflection for the patient and what it is that they are feeling, thinking, experiencing, and going through. The sole job is to help them navigate through their own lives and not to inject your own thoughts on it. You’re just there to serve as a reflection. So, when you start to think about it that way, then it changes. It feels less like you’ve been reined in or you’re not reacting, and it actually starts to feel more like my job, my offering as an actor, is to just ask a question in as neutral a way as I possibly can.
Now that you’ve had this experience — you’ve done all this dialogue, you’ve been in every scene, you’ve shot during COVID, and you’ve shot episodes in two days apiece — do you want to do this again? Do you want to keep exploring this character, even if it’s with different patients?
ADUBA: I haven’t thought about it, to be honest with you. I don’t know. The opportunity to explore a character again is always welcome, and there’s definitely more about her to unpack there, but I’d have to think about it. I don’t know.
You’ve talked about this being one of the hardest experiences you’ve had, but also being one of the most satisfying experiences you’ve had. How was it creatively fulfilling for you?
ADUBA: It was creatively fulfilling by the challenge of working to meet the mark and, quite honestly, meet my what my castmates had prepared. Therapy is a lot because one gives a lot of oneself in the session to their therapist, but acting is also a lot because there’s a lot of emotional self and heart that you have to exchange with each other in the room. Knowing that it was two days per episode, I knew that my castmates were working so hard and had such complex stories that they had to tell and these massive speeches, which they nailed, by the way. In my opinion, I think they were just really quite exceptional, every time. The beauty of being able to sit and listen was like, “I am watching you kill it.” That exceptionalism that you knew they were delivering with, made you want to verify you also were able to meet them where they were, with the intensity, intention, and passion that they were delivering. So, that became a massive challenge and a hurdle that I wanted to at least do my best to jump over, every day.
And I have to say her by name, the woman I got to work with on the show who assisted me in learning my lines, every episode, Maydelle Clarice. They would call cut and she would come running in with the next script for the next episode that we were shooting and we’d start drilling lines. We would work during lunch. We would work after we wrapped. We would work on the weekends – Saturday for four hours, and Sunday for four hours. The grind of doing the job was a lot, and it was about learning through Brooke that you can’t lose track of your pain, but you can put it down.
In Treatmentairs on Sunday and Monday nights on HBO.
KEEP READING:Anthony Ramos Confirms He’s In the Next ‘Transformers,’ Teases Role in Sci-Fi Film ‘Distant’
