Growing up in Chicago in the '80s and '90s, actress Lauren Ridloff didn’t see many people like her on TV or in the movies. As a deaf Black Latina woman, it was rare to have her lived experience reflected back to her.
“I saw pieces of myself out there—I think that was very common for a lot of people,” Lauren tells Women’s Health. “But honestly I didn't have somebody who I looked up to even when I was a child.”
Over the years—thanks to creatives like super-producer Shonda Rhimes, model-actor Nyle DiMarco, and the team behind the recent film CODA (which stands for “Children of Deaf Adults”)—that representation gap has started to narrow, says Lauren, albeit slowly. And, of course, she’s played her own important part in bringing deaf characters to life on screen.
Originally a teacher, Lauren got her big acting break in the 2018 Broadway production of Children of a Lesser God, for which she earned a Tony nomination. She went on to land the role of Connie on the hit AMC TV series The Walking Dead, and this week, can be seen in Marvel’s latest entry Eternals, as the MCU’s first deaf superhero.
Lauren plays speedster Makkari, who, in the comic books, was a white hearing man. Lauren admits she’s still not entirely sure why writer-director Chloe Zhao tapped her for the role, but she has a theory: “In my head, Marvel was looking at the characters and saw that they needed to be representative of the world, more so than what you see in the comic books,” she says. “It was time to make that jump and that leap.”
To be sure, making that leap required some work on Lauren’s part—one does not simply walk onto the set of a Marvel movie (!). No, Lauren worked hard with a team of trainers to transform into an Eternal—and had her own fitness “awakening” in the process.
Read on to find out how she keeps in fighting shape, both physically and mentally.
Lauren feels totally in the zone when she’s running.
The 43-year-old has been pounding the pavement since high school, when she joined the track team because she thought the coach was cute. (Relatable, much?) “It wasn't an instant love,” Lauren admits of competing in the 100- and 200-meter dashes. “I didn't know how to breathe; everything in my body hurt.”
But she continued training to win points with the coach, and all these years later, she’s glad she did. As an adult, she’s stuck with a three-to-four-days-a-week running schedule, typically logging about four to five miles at a time.
For Lauren, running isn’t so much about her physical fitness but rather her mental fitness. “It’s my meditation,” she says. “It’s my way to relax and to really contemplate and think. I can’t fully wake up until I get in a run.”
To play a runner, she focused on strength training.
Given that her character, Makkari, is a speedster, you’d think much of Lauren’s Eternals training would have centered on her beloved pastime of running. Not so. Instead, trainer David Higgins and his team devised a regimen of weight training and Pilates to build muscle (especially on Lauren’s lower half) so she’d look like a sprinter.
For weight-training, that meant “a lot” of squats and weighted step-ups. For Pilates, it meant plenty of core work on the reformer apparatus—which came in handy when Lauren had to shoot her high-speed scenes. “A lot of that was wire work—running in place and leaning forward,” Lauren explains. “That meant a lot of core engagement, and David got me ready for that.”
Now, Lauren likes to mix running and weights for a more focused workout.
Lauren credits Marvel boot camp with her fitness “awakening” and says she’s taken what she learned on set and incorporated it into her day-to-day routine (albeit, not quite at the same superhero level). “I've shifted more to weight training [in addition to running], and now I feel like my workout routine is so much more focused,” she says. “Thanks to Pilates I've become so much more aware of my core, my muscles, my back engagement—everything really. And I've infused that with some yoga into my routine.”
Much like running, Lauren finds yoga to be a body and brain soother. Really, she says, she’s partial to any movement-based activities during which she can focus on her heartbeat and breath as a way to find stillness. “My heartbeat is very stable,” she says. “It's very calming.”
Lauren complements her workout regimen by eating a plant-forward diet.
Though she grew up in a family of vegetarians, Lauren didn’t give the no-meat lifestyle a try until several years ago when she went vegan. Though she says she learned a lot about her body eating that way, she decided to go back to eating meat, and now describes herself as a “vegetarian who eats meat on the side.”
For breakfast, she’ll typically have a bowl of cottage cheese and Greek yogurt mixed together, topped with fruit (although lately she’s been “obsessed” with the very seasonally appropriate pumpkin puree). For lunch, it’s usually a wrap (“salad with some kind of protein”), and for dinner, she likes to finish her day with “a lot of vegetables” and perhaps a small side of chicken.
Watch Lauren crush her Pilates reformer workout:
Lauren doesn’t have much of a sweet tooth and prefers salty snacks like cheese puffs and popcorn. “The one thing I loved about being vegan,” she says, “is that it introduced me to 'nooch.' ” That’s nutritional yeast, for the uninitiated, and Lauren loves to sprinkle it on her popcorn for extra flavor.
At the end of the day, she’s also working on cutting herself some slack.
Lauren admits that, initially, after being cast as the first deaf Marvel superhero, she felt a lot of responsibility to represent her community. But lately, she’s eased up on all that.
“While I was running the other day, I just had this epiphany that it's not my responsibility to be the representative of a certain group of people,” she says. “It is my responsibility to be a representative of who I am, and as long as I stay authentic, and as long as I actually can tell the truth about who I am personally, that will end up [being] a better representation. I think that understanding of that weight really kind of went away.”
And so it would seem that, once again, a run has made all the difference for Lauren.
Amy Wilkinson
Amy Wilkinson is an entertainment editor who also specializes in health and wellness. When not editing or writing, she can be found teaching Pilates as a comprehensively certified instructor.
