The anxiety, the nagging tug for approval, the industry’s reaction, the folks back in West Baltimore — all that swam around her stomach. A shot of Jack quelled the tidal wave of nerves. For a time.
“I have a different sense of care around” this series, Ingram says. “It’s just special. It is home, you know.” She’s curled in the corner of a sofa after a photo shoot, dressed in gray sweats and a fuzzy sweater, exhausted but reflective.
To put this rung of her climb into perspective, Ingram asks whether I’ve listened to rapper J. Cole’s “2014 Forest Hills Drive.” It didn’t matter to Cole, says Ingram, whether he won a Grammy (he didn’t) or whether anyone loved it. “He knew he made some of the best stuff of his life up to that point. And I feel like that. I really do.”
Ingram has been stacking up knockout performances since her 2020 turn in “The Queen’s Gambit” (as Jolene, the tough and rock-solid friend of Anya Taylor-Joy’s chess prodigy). Now she’s straddling the line between supporting jaw-dropper and prestige-drama star. But there’s still that pit in her stomach, because this project hits different.
Created by Alma Har’el and based on the Laura Lippman novel of the same name, “Lady in the Lake” is ostensibly about two very different women — one Jewish and one Black — navigating the seedy underbelly of Charm City circa 1966. But at its core, the story crisscrosses race, capitalism, patriarchy, parenthood, the very definition of storytelling and the cost of dreaming outside the lines.
Natalie Portman co-stars as Madeline Schwartz (née Morgenstern), a Jewish housewife who goes nuclear on her nuclear family, blowing up her trad-wife life to fulfill her high school dream of becoming a reporter. Ingram plays Cleo Johnson, a Black mother of two whose dreams of overcoming her stifling circumstances are repeatedly cut short.
Narrating the series from the great beyond, Cleo explains that she was punished for wanting more. The women’s lives collide when Madeline attempts to solve Cleo’s murder to earn herself an A1 byline and the respect that comes with it.
Where Portman’s Maddie is uptight even as she becomes unwound, Ingram’s Cleo is chameleonlike, smoothly code-switching across Baltimore’s Black social strata. She moves through the world like a quiet storm.
“I could just feel it immediately,” Ingram says of her connection to Cleo. “There’s this thing that we say, ‘Some things you get free.’” She didn’t have to reach far to access Cleo’s hunger and drive. “Cleo is a woman who dreamed big, but life has a real way of sticking it to you sometimes, you know?”
It’s tricky to compare an actress to the character she plays on-screen. It’s performance, not autobiography. But the Cleo whom Ingram brings to life benefits from a natural force that the actress’s fans in the industry say sets her apart.
“She runs really deep and there’s so much going on, even when she’s still,” says Scott Frank, creator of “The Queen’s Gambit,” for which Ingram received her first Emmy nomination.
Playwright Dominique Morisseau witnessed how Ingram draws from a near-bottomless well of emotion earlier this year when the actress starred in the off-Broadway production of Morisseau’s “Sunset Baby.”
“I think she has a very old soul. There’s something that’s been put in her from her family that she is carrying,” the writer says. She has “immediate access to something that’s deeper than the realm that we’re all playing on.”
Nearly everyone who works with Ingram sees it. What worried Ingram — what still lingers in her mind — was even making it into the room.
It wasn’t supposed to be Moses Ingram in “Lady in the Lake.” Lupita Nyong’o originally had the role but had to bow out because of logistical concerns. Ingram auditioned while on another Apple TV Plus production filming in Toronto. Behind the scenes, the creative team could not agree on Nyong’o’s replacement — until they got Ingram’s tape. Shooting had already started, and she barely had time to prepare before she was needed on set.
“She knew Cleo. She didn’t need anybody to tell her who she was,” says Har’el, the show’s creator. “Anybody else would have been terrified, and I’m sure she was too. It’s hard to come in and take on such a complex character knowing who was supposed to play that. You feel like you have to prove yourself in a way, but there was none of that with her. From the first take, I knew we had a show.”
Reviews of the seven-episode miniseries, which premiered July 19, have been split. Har’el’s adaptation is heavy on mood, bold choices and symbolism, with a plot that bobs and weaves in a way that can feel frustrating. But what critics do agree on is that Ingram’s performance stands out.
The Hollywood Reporter called Ingram “fierce and compelling.” Time wrote that the actress’s “layered performance captures the character’s vulnerability as well as her intelligence and grit.” The Washington Post praised her “grounded brilliance and restraint.”
When we spoke the day after the New York premiere, Ingram was in a prereview zone. All the actress knew was that this was a moment to be grateful for.
“Really all anyone needs,” she says, “is for someone to say yes to them one time. I know so many ultra-talented actors that never get to show the full depth and range of what they have.” Now that she has more than a few yeses under her belt, Ingram is settling into another feeling: pressure. Would people like it? Would they like her in it?
Sure, Ingram can possess J. Cole levels of self-satisfaction with the work. Since receiving her first rejection for “not having enough … whatever,” Ingram has worked hard to squash any creeping notions of inadequacy, separating her self-worth from whether she books a job. But this is acting. Ultimately, “you want someone to agree,” she says. “But I hate that. I hate that so bad. I hate that I gotta prove to somebody that I’m X or Y or Z.”
Does she, at this point? This is the young actress who booked “The Queen’s Gambit” before graduating from Yale University’s storied master’s program in drama. Before that show became a sensation, Ingram was cast in Denzel Washington’s “The Tragedy of Macbeth.” She even got a crack at the Star Wars universe as a complex villain in Disney Plus’s “Obi-Wan Kenobi.” And she managed to deal with the online harassment and ugly racism that followed without breaking.
Does the pressure to prove yourself ever go away? Or do you need that “I’ll show you” fire to keep going? Ingram is figuring it out.
Frank, the “Queen’s Gambit” creator, describes Ingram as one of the greats, someone who can make him sit up and pay attention to words he’s read a thousand times. But he gets that impostor syndrome is real.
“I would tell Moses to strap in,” he says. “When we’re in our heads a lot, we catastrophize and it’s hard to get comfortable,” Even the best question why they were chosen. Why they get to do this thing so many want to do. Why they got that one yes.
The trick, Frank says, is to let the doubt “be the radio in the next room” — you can hear it but it doesn’t order your steps — because it’s inevitable. “That’s what’s going to happen being so good at what you do,” added Frank.
So what kind of doubt are we talking about? For Ingram, she had faith in her talent. But she wasn’t sure she’d ever get the chance to put it on display.
As a senior at Baltimore School for the Arts, Ingram felt adrift. She’d dreamed of attending Howard University, but even with financial assistance, she still couldn’t afford it. So instead she got an associate’s degree from Baltimore City Community College. The goal was to break into regional theater. “But it’s like a club,” she says, a very exclusive club. For years she worked odd jobs and kept auditioning. It wasn’t until she got into Yale’s drama school in 2016 that TV and film work seemed like a real possibility.
As we chat, I suggest that much like Cleo, Ingram herself was a talented dreamer whose life could’ve easily gone left instead of right. Cleo dreamed of being a singer and couldn’t make it happen. Ingram dreamed of being an actor and did.
“I never thought about that until just now. But yeah. I think it’s so sad,” says Ingram, who takes a beat before saying more. She wants to explain this place she’s in right now. On the precipice … of something. To break it all down, she turns to music again — this time, a show tune. There’s a song from 1977’s “Working,” based on Studs Terkel’s oral history of everyday Americans describing how they do their jobs — and, often, the dreams they carry with them. It’s called “If I Could’ve Been.”
If they had just let me go/ where I was rarin’ to go/ when I was rarin’ to go back then/ God only knows what I woulda been.
“And I know so, so many people who identify with that, and I think that is the thing, um … I’m sorry,” Ingram says before closing her eyes briefly. She takes a calming breath as she pinches the bridge of her nose, willing the tears gathering there not to fall. She wants to get this out.
“On hard days in this business, I remember that this is the thing that I asked for and the thing that I went after,” Ingram says. “Like I remember wanting it so bad it hurt, you know?”
So on days — not today — when the business of acting subsumes the art of acting, Ingram finds a way to suck “that s— up and keep it pushing.” She laughs to herself and asks me to forgive her language.
“But,” I offer, “that doesn’t make it any less hard.”
What she loves is the work. Acting is Ingram’s church. Where she feels most attuned to God. “Lady in the Lake,” she says, was a divine experience. That may sound woo-woo, but it’s clear to Ingram that something bigger than her was at work.
She thinks back to her high school graduation. Knowing that her friends would leave town in a few months was excruciating. “I remember sitting in the audience and being like, ‘I don’t know what I’m about to do,’” she says. When she walked out of the historic George Peabody Library after the ceremony, the sky was dark with rain. “‘God, what are you doing to me?’ I just remember being really sad, like, I don’t know what I’m going to do with my life.”
Flash-forward 10 years. One of the on-location shoots for “Lady in the Lake” was at the Peabody. “I remember crossing that hall being like, ‘Hold up, this is crazy!’”
“We were shooting scenes in places where I would wait for the bus. I think that’s how life works, right? You can’t see it in the moment, but somewhere it’s already written,” she says.
“I thought forever that if I was going to be anything — do anything — I had to get out,” Ingram says. “Just for the most beautiful thing I’ve done to bring me right back.” She speaks with awe. And without a hint of doubt.