Cush wears: dress, £1,095, Cecilie Bahnsen; Shoes, £980, Miu Miu; earrings, £125, Shrimps
Born and raised in Lewisham, she trained in the theatre before appearing as DC Whelan with Brenda Blethyn in ITV’s Vera in 2012. The following year, she was nominated for an Olivier for her Mark Antony in Phyllida Lloyd’s all-female Julius Caesar.
And after Josephine and I, a self-penned one-woman show about the dancer-turned- civil rights activist Josephine Baker, transferred from London to New York in 2015, she was cast as Lucca Quinn in the CBS legal drama The Good Wife and its follow-up, The Good Fight, making her a star in the US before becoming a household name at home.
That role saw Cush and her husband, tech director Sean Griffin, live in New York for five years. Now 36, she’s been back in the UK since early 2020, to a ferocious demand for her talents.
That year she appeared opposite David Tennant in Channel 4’s Deadwater Fell, then as a desperate, grieving mother in the BritBox drama The Beast Must Die, and next she’ll be seen as a woman with a dark secret in the upcoming Netflix thriller Stay Close.
It sounds like a relentless workload, but Cush feels ‘more at home on the stage, in the darkness, than I am sitting here with you. I’m more nervous as myself.’ Besides, she’s rarely overwhelmed, thanks to a keen understanding of her limits – especially since having Max.
‘[Work] is not something I could ever compromise on, and alongside that goes being a parent. I love being a mum, but it’s also why I’m not going to have any more children. Because I know what I can handle, and it means I can give appropriate time and love to my son, to my husband, and to the job that I love.’
She stops for a moment, then presses on. ‘The idea that you can “have it all”? Have five kids, and cook the dinners, and do the laundry, and paint the house? To me that is an expectation some people can fulfil… I can’t fulfil it. We all need to find our level of expectation, rather than comparing ourselves to others. Because then you’re happy, you’re content.’
Comparison is something she simply has no truck with, especially when it comes to parenting. ‘People say, “Oh, Marianne is two, and she’s completely potty-trained, and she cooked us a filet mignon the other night, and she’s speaking fluent Mandarin…”’
