Lauren Ridloff

Lauren Ridloff, born Lauren Teruel on April 6, 1978, in Chicago, Illinois, is a deaf American actress whose career spans theater, television, and film. She was born deaf to a Mexican-American father, Hugo, who worked as a counselor at the University of Illinois at Chicago and was also a musician, and an African-American mother who was an artist. Ridloff grew up in the Hyde Park neighborhood of Chicago. Her parents initially suspected a developmental delay, but learned she was deaf by the time she was two years old. They acquired sign language alongside her and enrolled her in Catholic school with hearing students. At age thirteen, she stopped using her voice, having decided that people were evaluating her intelligence based on how she sounded rather than what she said.

She later attended the Model Secondary School for the Deaf in Washington, D.C., where she was surrounded by deaf and hard-of-hearing peers for the first time. There she began engaging with the arts, starting with ceramics before becoming involved in drama. She played Dorothy in a school production of The Wiz and was a member of the cheerleading team, becoming one of the first deaf American cheerleaders to compete internationally.

Ridloff chose California State University, Northridge for its National Center on Deafness and its substantial deaf and hard-of-hearing student population. She majored in English with a concentration in creative writing, completing her degree in 2001. During her time at CSUN she joined a local deaf performing group and took up hip-hop dancing. After graduating, she worked at the NCOD on a program supporting post-secondary education for deaf and hard-of-hearing students. She subsequently entered the Miss Deaf America competition, having been inspired by the pageant two years earlier. She first won Miss Deaf Illinois and then won the national title, becoming the first competitor of African-American or Mexican-American descent to claim the crown and the second consecutive CSUN graduate to do so. Her competition performance included an ASL interpretation of Shel Silverstein's The Giving Tree. Following the win, she spent two years representing the National Association of the Deaf at luncheons and graduation ceremonies.

Ridloff then moved to New York City to study at Hunter College, where she earned a master's degree in education in 2005 with the goal of becoming a children's author. She went on to teach kindergarten and first grade at Public School 347 in Manhattan for nine years while also participating in deaf community theater and film projects. She married Douglas Ridloff, whom she had met at CSUN, in 2006. They have two sons, both of whom are deaf. She left teaching to care for her children, and the family lived in Williamsburg, Brooklyn before relocating to Austin, Texas, in 2022.

Before her Broadway debut, Ridloff appeared in small roles in the 2017 films Sign Gene: The First Deaf Superheroes and Wonderstruck, the latter of which she also joined as a consultant. She also appeared in the lyric video for John Legend's song "Love Me Now." Her path to Broadway began when director Kenny Leon, who was developing a revival of the 1980 play Children of a Lesser God, hired her to tutor him in American Sign Language. After more than a year of tutoring, Leon invited her to substitute at a read-through, and her performance led him to cast her in the lead role of Sarah Norman. The production had an initial run at the Berkshire Theatre Group in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, before opening on Broadway in April 2018. One of the most demanding elements of the role was using her voice, which she had not done since age thirteen. She worked with a vocal coach over the course of a year and described the experience as ultimately empowering. The revival closed on May 27, 2018.

Ridloff's Broadway appearance in Children of a Lesser God earned her a Tony Award nomination for Best Actress in a Play as well as a Theatre World Award, both in 2018. The role marked her Broadway debut and established her as a significant presence in American theater.

Following the Broadway run, Ridloff joined the ninth season of The Walking Dead, which premiered in October 2018, playing the character Connie. She had been a fan of the series since its 2010 premiere and submitted an audition tape to secure the role. In July 2019, she was cast as the superhero Makkari in the Marvel Cinematic Universe film Eternals, directed by Chloé Zhao and released in 2021. In the original comics, Makkari is a hearing white man; Zhao's casting of Ridloff revised the character to be a deaf woman of color, making Ridloff the first deaf superhero in the MCU. To film Eternals, she took a leave of absence from The Walking Dead, missing six consecutive episodes of the show's tenth season. Her appearance in the film was followed by a reported increase in web searches for American Sign Language courses.

In July 2022, Ridloff was among three deaf actors cast in an episode of the Fox anthology drama series Accused, directed by Marlee Matlin; the episode aired in January 2023. That same year, she had been attached to star in a romantic drama series being developed by Ava DuVernay for Starz, reuniting with her Children of a Lesser God co-star Joshua Jackson. Ridloff was also set as an executive producer on the project alongside DuVernay and Jackson. Starz had committed to a three-season order in May 2022, but in September 2023 the network announced the series would not proceed, following DuVernay's departure after her contract with Warner Bros. TV ended.

Among her additional recognitions, Ridloff received the SAG-AFTRA Harold Russell Award at the 41st Media Access Awards in 2020, and the British Academy of Film and Television Arts named her a 2020 Breakthrough performer. In March 2023, the New York Women in Film & Television honored her at their Muse Awards.