Hi everyone, Sophia Bush here. Welcome to work in progress, where I talk to people who inspire me about how they got to where they are and where they think they're still going.

Guys, this week is extra special because we have an extra episode for you today with actress Simone Misek. Simone is a rule breaker. She is a badass and she has broken through some pretty serious glass ceilings.

She played TV's first African American female superhero, Misty Knight, on Netflix's hit series, Luke Cage.

She stars as Judge Lola Carmichael on all rise and has played so many other incredible roles.

Also, if you have not seen her on the second season of All-Thered Carbon, you have to watch it. She's unbelievable.

I loved talking to her about her roles, how she got into acting, what her journey was, her faith, her family, and the influence that they had on her and so much more.

Naturally, we dove right into talking about all the things, so here you go. Enjoy.

Your show All-Rise was actually the first primetime scripted series to embark on virtual production to do an episode tackling what's going on right now with COVID.

What can you tell us about that and what was the experience like?

We actually don't start shooting for another couple of days, so we haven't done it yet.

I can't tell you what it's going to be like. We can do a follow-up, five minute of what that was, but what is so cool about it is we're all just such a tight group.

There's a group chat with our producers and the core seven main castmates.

We all just periodically check in how everybody's doing, what's going on, and we get a text message from one of our executive producers, Michael Robbins.

We're going to hop on a Zoom call and we're all just thinking, oh, this is just for us to chat, catch up, make sure everybody is safe and sound.

And they're like, they dropped the bomb. Like, actually, we're going to do this Zoom episode and we all immediately were like, yes, this is so great.

And so our showrunner, our kosher runner and creator, Greg Spottiswood started reading the outline of what he had come up with and what he thought it was going to be.

And we were all just like, yeah, I mean, you would think we were doing the episode. We were so excited about, you know, just the turns and what this meant for each character in the middle of the reality of what this COVID-19 is.

You know, how the justice system is trying to manage, you know, protecting people's constitutional rights. And yet, this is a crisis where judges and lawyers are not necessarily able to do the things that they were once able to do and you still got people.

You know, we're hearing these reports every day of prisoners who are getting sick inside of jails, they can't get water or soap or, you know, just basic necessities, let alone medical care. And, you know, are we leaving these people to die? All of these things that the show can tackle. So we were already excited about it without without knowing exactly what the storyline is going to be still haven't read the script yet.

I can't tell you, but from what they proposed, it's really obviously timely and it's exciting, but because of the way that our show is set up, our Greg always says, you know, our actors are our production value.

We don't have any big explosions. We don't have any shootouts. It's you guys, you know, and your relationships every single day that audiences are drawn to and they want to watch.

And so without needing those other things, you can realistically shoot an episode via zoom, which is what we're going to do. And so it's exciting. I just got a package with the equipment.

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