This Actress Has Played Five Roles Created for Men: 'How Do You Think I Have a Career?'

She has graced some of your favorite movies and TV shows: Desperate Housewives, Marvel's Luke Cage, 12 Years a Slave. The list goes on.

And now, Alfre Woodard stars in the Duffer brothers' Netflix follow-up to Stranger Things, which is now streaming.

While out promoting The Boroughs, the beloved Oscar nominee, 73, opened up about her versatile career - which includes having flipped the script on a number of roles that were originally imagined for the opposite sex.

"How do you think I have a career?" she told AARP's Movies for Grownups in a recent interview article. "That has happened five times in my life when I played a role meant for a curmudgeonly, older white guy."

Woodard's latest on-screen effort is The Boroughs, which currently holds an impressive 95% average critics' rating on Rotten Tomatoes. The series follows a group of retirement community residents battling an otherworldly threat.

Woodard, who is a former high school athlete (track and basketball), likened her fellow septuagenarian co-stars - including Alfred Molina, Geena Davis and Bill Pullman - to a seasoned relay team during her recent AARP interview: "It was like we'd been running together since junior high and now you're at the Olympics. You put your hand out, bam, you know the baton is there."

The Tulsa native also reflected on her earlier years, including an era of segregation - Tulsa high schools were not desegregated until 1973 - though she never seems to have never doubted that she could say and do what she wanted: "From the time I can remember, my father would say, 'Nobody, no man in this world, I don't care who it is, is better than you are.' What I got from my family is a strong sense of self, a sense of value."

Learn more from Woodard's recent chat in the YouTube clip below.

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This story was originally published May 24, 2026 at 4:40 PM.