Laverne Cox

speaker

477 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Jun 2026 last heard 30 Jun

Laverne Cox’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 1.

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Reclaiming with Monica Lewinsky · Laverne Cox · 30 Jun 2026 podcast

I had actually gotten... I was getting grad school applications.

Okay.

By the time my mom retired that year and had a little money from her retirement and took us to a trip to Hawaii.

And I had GRE study materials by the pool.

Grad school applications were arriving in the mail.

And I decided, because my birthday is May 29th, when I turned 40, I was just like, what am I doing?

I had... The story I was telling myself is that I...

the dream of being a mainstream actress, the big career that I dreamed of, wasn't possible after 40, and certainly not for a Black trans woman.

So I was sort of like, I spent all these years sacrificing everything to go to acting class, to pay money for headshots instead of rent, and all the things you do, mopping floors and cleaning toilets and answering phones to get acting classes for free.

interning in acting studios.

And I turned 40 and I was just like, I was in, you know, I don't know if anybody, student loan debt, credit card debt, rent arrears, just kind of like, my life is in shambles.

I'm 40 and I've like sacrificed everything for this dream, you know, that is just clearly not going to happen because, I mean, what trans person, especially a black trans woman, could it happen for?

And so I was just, okay, I'm going to,

Let's let this go.

Let's go to grad school.

I'm kind of smart.

I was looking into studying, like doing a women's studies, you know, African-American studies with journalism and kind of designing my own major kind of thing, getting applications.

And then the Orange Audition came along and I was very ambivalent, but then my manager sent me the scripts and I just,

I was like, this is great.

And I had let go of the dream of being an actor, but I still loved acting.

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