Uzo Aduba on that time she went to a prison as a Medfield youngster

She was part of a 'Scared Straight' program when she was a kid.

June 23, 2016

1 minute to read

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bRauxwKiKJM

Medfield’s Uzo Aduba plays Suzanne “Crazy Eyes” Warren, one of the handful of prisoners serving their time inside Litchfield on Netflix’s Orange Is the New Black. She did her research for the part, as any good actor does, but she admitted to Stephen Colbert on Wednesday’s The Late Show that she didn’t visit an actual prison as part of the legwork.

Aduba explained, however, that an experience from her childhood in Medfield taught her just about everything she had to know.

“When I was a kid, we went to ‘Scared Straight’ in my hometown,” she said. “It’s a real program.”

Quick refresher: Scared Straight is a program that brought kids to prisons to talk to inmates and scare them into not doing bad things. (Think Prison Mike from The Office, but in real life.) A documentary and TV show also exists that specifically shows troubled kids visiting prisons.

Aduba added that Medfield is a small town outside of Boston (“Go Sox!” she said and immediately retreated because, well, New York.)

“We went, and our town has zero—zero—crime whatsoever,” she added.

“But they figured they needed to scare the kids anyway,” Colbert said.

“Exactly, exactly,” she said. “But it worked. I really was scared. I was like, ‘I never want to do this.’”