Known for portraying dual lives of FBI junior special agent Astrid Farnsworth on J.J. Abram’s sci-fi series Fringe, in real life Jasika Nicole has traveled between worlds growing up as a biracial lesbian in the south before moving to New York to pursue acting.
She opens up to The Adovcate’s editor Matthew Breen about growing up between two worlds, introducing her girlfriend to her father, homophobic stigmas in the African-American community, and portraying a character with Asperger’s syndrome.
Read some of the most interesting highlights from the fascinating interview:
Though she’s been openly lesbian for as long as she’s been dating women (since 2005, when she was filming the dance-themed movie Take the Lead, starring Antonio Banderas), grappling with her sexual identity as a young woman was problematic. “I had to be 13 or 14 years old, and I was in my room, and I was thinking, ‘There’s a very strong possibility I’m gay, but there’s no way I could be biracial and gay.’ I just knew I wasn’t strong enough to be able to carry both of those things in Birmingham, and so I just—I didn’t think about it.”
Five years ago she called her mother to say she was planning to go on a date with a woman. “She laughed and she was super excited for me,” Nicole says.
The next year Nicole called her father to say she would be visiting Alabama with her then-new girlfriend, Claire, a social worker. But he took the news badly, and father and daughter didn’t speak for nine months. “It was really crappy because I’ve always been Daddy’s girl,” she says.
They’ve since reconciled, and her father has welcomed Claire (with whom Nicole lives in New York and Vancouver, Canada, where Fringe is taped) and apologized for each day they didn’t speak. But Nicole empathizes with his initial reticence. “It’s not something that is necessarily talked about a lot in the African-American community,” she says. “I can’t take away years of growing up thinking that homosexuality is wrong. That’s not something I could do single-handedly.”
But leading parallel lives prior to playing parallel roles was just the tip of the coincidence iceberg. Astrid’s counterpart has Asperger’s syndrome, a disorder on the autism spectrum. “The writers did not know about my sister when they wrote Astrid’s character,” she says. Nicole’s 12-year-old sister, Sedric, is autistic, though she’s lower-functioning than the alternate Astrid character. With such a close connection to the disorder, Nicole has carefully attempted to be realistic and to avoid stereotypes, sensitively drawing on her experiences with Sedric and her friends. “With television shows you have to do certain things to communicate to the audience,” she says. “You don’t want to overdo it, and you don’t want to be offensive about it. I’ve been with her for 12 years, so I know her pretty well.”
Read more in the complete interview with Nicole on Advocate.com now.
