Emayatzy Corinealdi plays a woman viewers have watched hold everything together for three seasons, and in the fourth one she starts taking pills.
The response has not been sympathy. It has been disappointment, and Corinealdi, who plays the defense attorney Jax Stewart on Reasonable Doubt, is not accepting the premise.
“How can you be disappointed?” she said. “She is the same person.”
Her reading of the discomfort is sharper than the discomfort itself. “There’s something there that’s uncomfortable,” she said. “You don’t want to see it. Because we don’t like to see someone who has it together as much as this woman does possibly go down this road.”
“I think that is what is bothering people,” she said.
That is the whole argument, and it is not really about a character. A woman who is visibly managing everything is easier for everybody around her, and the moment she stops, the reaction aimed at her is not concern; it is a kind of grievance. Corinealdi is pointing at the audience rather than defending a plot.
She is also refusing to write the character off. “Her strength! Everything that’s there, that is still present in her, deciding to take these pills,” she said. “She’s going to persevere. She’s going to do all the things.”
The show streams on Hulu. Corinealdi has described the storyline as a transformation whose direction is not settled yet, saying only that time will tell as the season goes on, and she has said it is very hard for a woman like Jax, who is used to being in control and on her feet doing what needs to be done.
She has said addiction is not something the character ever sees coming, that finding herself in that space is a blow to her reality, and that she tries very hard to distance herself from that truth.
