This week clearly belongs to actress Thuso Mbedu, who's showcase in two magazine covers has seen her in the spotlight ahead of the premiere of the ahead of her much- anticipated series The Underground Railroad launching next week Friday, 14 May.
The International Emmy-Award nominated South African actress is cast in the Amazon and Barry Jenkins’ The Underground Railroad for the lead role of Cora, a series based on Colson Whitehead’s best-selling novel, which won both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award.
This week she bagged two cover features - one in Emmy Magazine and another in The Hollywood Reporter, after being named 2021 must watch faces by Essence Magazine just a few weeks ago. This also comes after she was cast for a role in new feature film opposite Academy Award winning actress Viola Davis.
In an interview with Candice Frederick, the Emmy Award-nominee speaks about the road that led to "The Underground Railroad, an American series where she plays Cora while highlighting the significance behind the words “Faith, Love, Hope”, which is tattoed on her collar bone. She delves on everything about her life, the passing of her matriarchs, studying in Johannesburg and prevailing her "darkest year" after almost losing hope on her acting career.
At 24, Mbedu says she "made friends with this cough syrup" that made her hallucinate. "I'd lost all hope. The only reason I didn't take my life in 2016 was my sister. Everything that I've gone through, every person that I've lost, my sister has also lost. So, it wouldn't be fair for me to add my body to all the losses my sister has faced."
Around that time, she'd gotten an audition and planned to give it her all. But her hopes were crushed once again when she saw during her callback that another actress had been invited. "I was going to call my agent and tell her that I was too tired," she says. "I had no fight in me left. I was not going to do the callback. If they wanted to give the role to someone else, they could do that."
By Thursday, the actress revealed another cover she scored on The Hollywood Reporter penned by South African expat journalist Nadia Neophytou.
