Laverne Cox’s new role in Clean Slate has been more of a personal conflict than an acting challenge. The 52-year-old actress infused elements of her childhood trauma into the plot, finding the process emotionally exhausting rather than cathartic.
The Prime Video series follows Harry Slate (George Wallace), a loudmouthed Alabama car wash owner, and his estranged child, Desiree (Cox), a trans woman who returns home after her New York art gallery fails. Desperate to rebuild her life, she must navigate her father’s strict worldview while trying to repair their broken relationship.
For Cox, the series became a vessel for storytelling and healing. She reconstructed past struggles into humor, using comedy to process difficult personal experiences. However, revisiting these memories made it one of the toughest performances of her career.
Cox told People that Clean Slate was “less cathartic and it wasn’t healing.”
She explained, “It was triggering, almost every day. Some actors might disagree, but I think sometimes you have to be triggered as an actor to get to what the character might be feeling.”
Certain scenes heightened the emotional weight of the show. The church scenes stirred mixed emotions, while the set design of her character’s father’s house, eerily similar to her own mother’s home, felt unsettling.
This underscored how deeply trauma is embedded in both physical spaces and the psyche. Cox reflected, “The South is in the air and in the space, in the mentality. And trauma lives in ourselves; trauma lives in our nervous systems, and it’s physical, and a lot of it’s preverbal. So that was all coming up. I didn’t even fully understand it, but you use it.”
To cope, she turned to her acting coach and therapist, realizing that processing raw emotions was just as important as channeling them on-screen.
The Orange Is the New Black alum added, “Sometimes, to get to the truth of something really deep, raw, and catastrophic, to make that real, you have to re-traumatize yourself; you have to be triggered. But the trick is knowing how to get out of it.”
Despite the personal toll, Cox hopes Clean Slate resonates with those who see themselves in her story, inspiring connection and compassion.
Stream Clean Slate, now available on Prime Video.
