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Cynthia Erivo Nearly Gave Up Singing To Be A Spinal Surgeon

By Michael Bamidele

17 November 2019   |   12:54 pm

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Nigerian-British actress and Grammy winning singer Cynthia Erivo disclosed that she nearly gave up singing to be a spinal surgeon. The "Harriet" star revealed this in a chat with Emmy winning American actress Alfre Woodard on Variety's “Variety Studio: Actors on Actors”. Erivo said she had been singing since she was toddler. Her mother noticed…

Cynthia Erivo | IMAGE: IMDB

Nigerian-British actress and Grammy winning singer Cynthia Erivo disclosed that she nearly gave up singing to be a spinal surgeon.

The “Harriet” star revealed this in a chat with Emmy winning American actress Alfre Woodard on Variety’s “Variety Studio: Actors on Actors”.

Erivo said she had been singing since she was toddler. Her mother noticed she’d hum while eating her food when she was just 18 months old, and wrote down in her baby book that she’d go on to be a singer.

However, that natural talent was almost wasted when she was in high school.

“I had a real weird phase when I was about 16. I just stopped doing it for a second. I got shy,” Erivo said.

“Everyone around me in my class, they wanted to be doctors, lawyers, nurses and I didn’t want that. I wanted to sing and act, but I felt weird because nobody else in my class would do it. I was in a class full of people who were brain boxes. I happened to be able to keep up with all those brain boxes, so I felt weird. I was just like ‘Okay, I’ll be a spinal surgeon. That’s what I’ll be.’ And I just decided I’ll do that. I realized a had a penchant for biology and I loved it and I was good at it so I was going to keep doing that.”

Luckily, one day, her mom noticed she hadn’t sung for a while, and gently nudged her to start back up again.

“She just goes, ‘Where’s your singing? Is there a concert or something we can go and listen to? Make sure you’re singing,’” Erivo recalled. “Didn’t say anything other than that. It hit me in the back of my head, like ‘Okay, I guess I can’t not do that.”

Cynthia Erivo as Harriet Tubman in “Harriet” – Vanity Fair

Erivo whose birth name is Cynthia Chinasaokwu O. Erivo recently starred as Harriet Tubman in the 2019 biopic “Harriet”.

She is known for her performance as Celie in the Broadway revival of “The Color Purple”, for which she won the 2016 Tony Award for Best Actress in a Musical and was one of nine recipients of the 2017 Grammy Award for Best Musical Theater Album.