Laverne Cox is tired of shame. Tired of holding on to things that don’t serve her, tired of being anything other than her authentic self. That’s why she decided to go public with a secret she only started acknowledging in 2019: her age.
“I’m 48,” she says on a recent phone call ahead of the launch of her new Shondaland podcast, The Laverne Cox Show. “Forty-nine in May.”
The topic came up after this writer, having discovered her age in pre-interview research, opened the conversation by expressing some surprise at this fact — as well as the acknowledgment that she looks amazing. (Doesn’t she?!) Cox, an activist and a four-time Emmy nominee actor for her work on Orange Is the New Black, is absolutely a trailblazer. Her career has been marked by many firsts — first openly trans Emmy nominee, first openly trans person on the cover of Time, first trans lead on a primetime drama — and yet she admits that up until 2019, she had been deliberately hiding her age.
“In 2000, I was dating this younger guy, and he broke up with me because of my age,” she recalls. “As I was nearing 30, I just felt like in the dating market, my career wasn't where I wanted it to be, and in my mind, I had this story that as I approach 30, I was less marketable as an actress and I was less marketable as a woman in the singles market.”
Cox decided to be 22 on dating apps, and when asked her age in the real world, she’d say “over 21.” Eventually people started to figure it out, and she’d be evasive about it or fib, and, well, “It got really crazy. It got insane,” she says. Cox knew she needed to confront her fears, and then a funny thing happened: she realized they were completely unfounded. She’d been working consistently. She had a great guy in her life. All the bad things she thought would happen if her real age got out not only didn’t happen; her life was just fine, actually better than fine. So in 2019, while giving a speech in Texas, Cox mustered up the courage to reveal her age to the audience. And...nobody cared.
“We live in an ageist culture for sure, but the stories I told myself weren't really true,” she says. “It's like, so many things that we have shame about, a lot of people aren’t really pressed about. The shame stuff is about the stories we tell ourselves. To let go of all those stories, it's really empowering.”
Unpacking shame, dealing with trauma, searching for healing, and being vulnerable — this is the stuff we expect of actors, but when they’re characters, not so much in real life. But this is the work that’s on Cox’s agenda for The Laverne Cox Show, her new weekly podcast produced by Shondaland Audio and iHeartMedia. Don’t expect some fluffy, frivolous exercise in Hollywood people stroking each others’ egos. Cox’s show is about digging deep into what it takes to raise consciousness and become the highest expression of herself, and a lot of that has to do with excavating shame and old wounds.
“The body doesn't know what trauma happened 10 or 20 years ago,” Cox says, paraphrasing information she learned from her therapist, who’ll be one of the guests on her podcast. “When we're triggered, the body experiences the trauma as if it's happening right now. And then the body starts releasing stress hormones, releasing cortisol, adrenaline — the survival response. I've come to understand that most of my life I've lived in this heightened sort of survival place and that is really detrimental to my health and well-being. I came up with the term ‘spiritual makeover’ just randomly...I want to have conversations with brilliant people who help me get closer to that heightened spiritual place.”
Of course, a fair degree of the trauma and shame Cox is shedding comes as a result of her being a Black, trans woman from a working-class Southern town (Mobile, Alabama), and to be sure, her podcast delves into her experience. But the specificity of her life makes it universal, particularly as she talks about healing work.
The first episode of Cox’s podcast features Brené Brown, the noted lecturer and writer who specializes in shame, vulnerability, and empathy, and it’s no exaggeration to call their conversation enlightening and piercing. In it, the pair dig into unlearning shame but also race relations, personal accountability, the backlash Brown encountered after taking a stand against white supremacy and much more. Subsequent episodes will feature other notable guests, such as Virgie Tovar, an expert on body imagery and fatphobia, and Kevin Allred, a writer who examines one of Cox’s favorite topics — Beyoncé — through the lens of Black feminism. Cox’s program will take on topics from the political to the personal, including what it’s like to date as a Black trans woman over 40.
As a podcast host, Cox is laying herself bare, inquisitive, humble, and revealing. “I’m nervous,” she admits. “I'm scared. I would be lying if I said I wasn't. But I want to go there. I want to tell the truth.”
At 48, she’s finally ready to do so — without shame.
Malcolm Venable is a staff writer for Shondaland.
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