As an actress, what’s the difference between playing Michelle Robinson versus Michelle Obama?

“Michelle Obama is now... But Michelle Robinson is the girl from South Side. She’s the girl figuring it out still, she’s a second-year associate at a law firm. She went to Princeton and Harvard and is successful in her own right. [I'm playing] the beginnings of Michelle Obama. She could stand within her own intelligence and her own career choices. She didn’t have to have Obama to be who she is. I think they just made each other better.”

What's great about your performance is that you're embodying Michelle, not just impersonating her. How did you decide how to play her?

“That, from the beginning, was important to me. I didn’t want to imitate or make a caricature. I didn’t want to SNL her. They’re awesome on SNL, but it could have gone really bad, fast.

"It was important for me to humanize her, and for people to feel her, and for her to be accessible. It was a real conversation. I think the script did a lot of the work — these were people who knew they wanted to do more in life, and they challenged each other.”

Speaking of this idea of accessibility, there are a lot of great moments of code-switching, where Michelle talks about being a Black woman in conventionally white spaces. What was that like?

"We do it constantly. That was what her reluctance [to dating Barack] was based in. One, she felt like between work and home, she was on Planet Black and landed on Planet White. She had to constantly be two different people all the time. She was tired of that. She just wanted to be herself all the time, with someone else."