“I really don’t like waiting around to work, and I love to work.”

One glance at Kara Young’s résumé makes the truth of that statement plain enough. But she sells the line—just as she is currently doing in the first Broadway revival of Proof, David Auburn’s Pulitzer Prize winner from 2000. After back-to-back Tony wins (for Purlie Victorious in 2024 and Purpose last year) and a stint off-Broadway in Gruesome Playground Injuries (which sped into production when the coveted Lucille Lortel Theater became available earlier than expected), the actor had meant to take a hard-earned break—at least from acting. Young knew the two movies she shot late in 2024, Aleshea Harris’s adaptation of her own play Is God Is and Boots Riley’s I Love Boosters (featuring, as it happens, her future Proof co-star Don Cheadle), would be coming out around the same time, and doing press is its own job.

However, life soon started meddling in her plans. A series of missed flights, deplanings, and cancellations meant missing Boosters’ South by Southwest premiere—and then the call came. Would she fill in for Samira Wiley, who had to drop out of Proof for health reasons? Young flew back to New York on a Monday, entered rehearsals the next day, and was in previews a little over a week later. The process was “quick and dirty, the way it used to be,” she says, recalling the hustle of her early career. “You work fast, you make choices, you jump into the fire, and just go.”

Proof—which Young describes as “one of the plays that all the kids at the stage door tell me they’ve done a scene from”—follows two sisters struggling with the loss of their math-genius father. Young’s character, Claire, is the business-minded one, eager to take matters into her own hands—a trait shared with her Is God Is character, Racine. Harris’s film, though, trades brainy barbs for some pretty vicious violence as a set of twins, badly scarred from a childhood fire, go on a journey to confront the root of their trauma.

Young will start rehearsals for a starry off-Broadway revival of The Whoopi Monologues during the last few weeks of Proof’s run, at which point another theater stalwart, Adrienne Warren, will enter the show in her place. But ahead of that, the charismatic actor sat down with Vogue to discuss career coincidences, onscreen rage, and growing up in Harlem.

Vogue: With some two and a half weeks to find Claire, are you content with where you landed?

Kara Young: I’m never content in any process, to be very honest with you. I’m always looking to build more history and nuance and humanness. Claire’s been navigating this whole time being away from her family. There’s been an immense amount of financial sacrifice that she’s been working with to make sure that this family is taken care of. I’m going to continue to build until my last performance, which is always the case. There always could be more. How do I honor someone in the five scenes that we have? How do we actually make this person real and filled with all of their life in those few scenes?

How do you let go of screen performances?

It’s a really different thing to get over. We had our premiere at BAM the other night, and here are people that know you, some that don’t—a mixture of people, mostly of community, to some degree. That is a really tough thing, but at the same time, I remember the first time I watched it, I watched it by myself in a theater, and I walked out and called my people and they’re like, “What does it feel like to be leading a film?” And I said, “I have to be honest with you, I literally stopped watching myself, because it was about the story.” It was just so meticulously, artistically compounded into Aleshea’s vision, and every single shot is so intentionally done that the story took me on the journey. I forgot that I was in this film.

Are you usually more self-conscious watching yourself?

For sure! But also, I don’t think I’ve ever had this experience. I’ve led films, I’ve seen them in theaters, but I haven’t had this kind of experience where the play is now adapted into a film. I understand the journey a little bit differently, from seeing the play at Soho Rep in 2018 and being absolutely blown away by that, by those performances and the story. The journey of it and knowing the weight and importance of this cult play Aleshea has given us, that has been produced all over the world and now it’s, like, in the vault… it’s something about that that’s beyond me. Like, my performance is not even the thing, you know what I mean?

What is this story to you? It has so many myths, and starts out like The Odyssey kind of, but then it’s not that. It bucks every expectation.

The story, to me, is about two young women who have navigated their world as survivors, as resilient people who grew up in the foster care system, having suffered a traumatic fire where their mother died. That’s what they know. They have made their world as joyous as it possibly can be, and they are okay together. Obviously the world comes at them very differently, but we exist together. We get a letter saying our mom is actually on her deathbed and to come visit her, so the journey is almost like a journey to know ourselves a little bit more. When we meet our mother, she tells us that our daddy tried to kill us and that her dying wish is for us to kill him. It’s about cutting the root of the pain. Is God Is is the most epic, Southern, Greek-odyssey-road-trip sisterhood of spirit. It’s about understanding the root of who we are and cutting it.

The movie has an interesting relationship to violence. It’s about cutting the root of trauma but, without spoiling anything, its leads are not Disney heroes. The roots of that violence have spread and it’s everywhere. What do you make of that?

What was very interesting to me is that one character believes they’re a killer. There’s that line, “We come from a man who tried to kill our mama, and our mama wants to kill that man. It’s in the blood.” There’s something about understanding that that is who you are. But I didn’t know that before. You think about a child who never knew who they were and now they know. The violence in the film, of course it exists, but there’s something about Racine pursuing that versus Anaia not wanting to. It’s the representation of hope, and breaking cycles, and even picking at our scars, but they continue to bleed. Is Racine correct? That’s for people to decide. The audience that I saw it with, once something happened, it was like, whoa. Picking at the scars and reopening wounds may never be the healthiest thing to do, yet if you don’t open the wound, it’s still going to be there and you’re still going to know that it’s there. That’s Racine’s journey, completely reopening, obliterating, and doing surgery on the wound.

The movie is gruesome as hell. Are you squeamish?

I was sitting next to my mom the other day and she was going, No! But she’s very squeamish, and I—I’m not going to say I like it. I don’t know what I like. I actually don’t. But I really enjoy what I see, which is a justified rage onscreen. I heard Aleshea say, the other day, something to the effect of, “Witnessing the full spectrum of our rage, of our humanity, we’ve never seen that onscreen. We’ve never experienced it from Black vessels, seeing the full spectrum of our humanity.” And that rage, our rage, does exist. As people watch this, people of color, Black women, there is a catharsis in what it means to heal and what it means to be hopeful and get to the crux of the thing that makes you angry and makes you rageful. These are valid feelings. We’ve seen the patriarchy onscreen do that over and over again. It’s cemented in our heads. But we have never seen Black women like this, ever. It’s Greek! It’s like Medea killing her children.

Tell me about Boosters. I know you’ve worked with Boots before. It’s such a fun part where–

I haven’t seen this!

Are you kidding? What do you know about it?

Well, I know the story. I read the screenplay and thought it was a really wild ride.

So you don’t know what you look like in the movie?

I don’t! This is what I do know: I know that I was on set. I finished shooting Is God Is in late 2024 and ended up staying an extra week in New Orleans. I have a lot of family in New Orleans, so I spent my first Thanksgiving there and thought, let me fly out to Atlanta, where Boosters was shooting, and say what’s up to Boots, because it’s a quick flight. I’m in the South, might as well. I wanted to visit set because, when we were shooting I’m a Virgo, I would be on set when I wasn’t shooting. I heard that the world [of I Love Boosters] is so insane, so I go to the soundstage and, Holy shit. It’s the scene with Demi Moore and the rolling cart. I’m thinking, This is so cool. Boots had already mentioned he wanted somebody to do this part and asked if I was available. And then he goes, “I think you have a fitting right now.”

But then the other story is even crazier. I was talking to this man, we were chopping it up. He’s in prosthetics, whatever, I can’t really see what he looks like. And Boots is like, “You know that’s Don Cheadle, right?” We’d never met before that. So when we’re on set, we’re talking about theater, he’s telling me they want him to read for Proof, I tell him it’s a great play, and then my phone dings, and it says, “Proof reading offer.”

Why didn’t you follow that Proof offer?

Just decisions, in regards to staying available for film and television.

How long did Boosters take you?

I think I was only there for three days. Most of my voice work and the latter scenes were either from my phone, or I ended up recording some stuff after we shot.

Boots seems like the kind of person who you vibe with immediately or you don’t, but if you do it’s an instant trust.

Yeah, totally. Boots is a visionary, his imagination is radical. Like, what does freedom look like in your mind? Where can our thoughts go, as artists? I walked onto the soundstage and I was completely blown away. He really does step outside of the box. He’s constantly in the mode of creation no matter what. Boots Riley: inspiration forever.

The last thing that we, the public, know you’ll be getting up to is the premiere of Dominique Morisseau’s Mix and Master on Broadway early next year. It’s a Bronx story, but you’re a Harlemite–what’s going on there?

I cannot wait until people see this absolute genius. We’ve done a few workshops together over the course of the last year, but now it’s building that world and stepping into it. Some people don’t know that I was born in Harlem Hospital, but I spent the first few years of my life in the Bronx. As a New Yorker, as a Harlemite, the two are very close. I love the Bronx, I really do. It’s about honoring those before you, the people whose shoulders on which you stand. There are stories within the story, but it’s two people where one person reveres the next, and it is the last standing record shop in the Bronx. Gentrification is rampant and it feels like a hopeless situation, to be very honest with you, because I’m from Harlem and I’ve seen that shit. But also it’s about trying to save a life, trying to tell someone how much they mean to you, and how music can change you, how music can shift so much inside of you, and a reminder of your presence on the planet.

That’s going to be a New York story, Boosters is a Bay Area story, Is God Is is Southern gothic. What’s the Harlem story you haven’t told yet?

I don’t have these dream-role-type things, but I’ve always seen myself being in an epic ’70s Harlem film. I’m talking about what it means to dance and be free. What was a time when we were just free? I don’t know how to describe it. I was supposed to be an adult in the ’70s. It’s a time where Black people populated Harlem and I wish I could just go back in time. Every time I see videos or pictures of Black women in Harlem in the ’70s, I’m just like, Take me there right now.

This conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.