Trivia

After having mostly unsuccessful auditions, Aduba got the call that she got the role of Crazy Eyes on "Orange is the New Black," 45 minutes after she decided to quit acting altogether.

In a 2014 interview with The Improper Bostonian magazine, Aduba said that growing up in New England, she often encountered people who couldn't pronounce her first name, Uzoamaka. "In grade school, because my last name started with an A, I was the first in roll call, and nobody ever knew how to pronounce it. So I went home and asked my mother if I could be called Zoe. I remember she was cooking, and in her Nigerian accent she said, 'Why?' I said, 'Nobody can pronounce it.' Without missing a beat, she said, 'If they can learn to say Tchaikovsky and Michelangelo and Dostoyevsky, they can learn to say Uzoamaka'".

Aduba told NPR interviewer Michel Martin that her full first name, Uzoamaka, means "the road is good" in her parents' country of origin, Nigeria.

She and Edward Asner are the only two people to win Emmys in both Drama and Comedy categories for playing the same character. Asner played the character of "Lou Grant" in The Mary Tyler Moore Show (1970) (Comedy) and in Lou Grant (1977) (Drama), while Aduba owes her Emmys in Comedy (2014) and Drama (2015) for her performance as "Crazy Eyes" to Orange Is the New Black (2013)'s switch from the Comedy to Drama competition (due to newly introduced Emmy rules in the 2014/2015 season).

She is only the 3rd performer ever to win Emmys for acting across all three genres: Comedy, Drama & Limited Series/TV Movie. The other two persons are Edward Asner and Cloris Leachman, respectively.

She is a classically trained opera singer.

She is a registered Democrat.

Her sister ran a race with heels on and won.