Carmen Ejogo leapt in the air and grasped two lengths of silk, each the color of arterial blood. She took a deep breath, fell back and spun upside-down in the middle of a warehouse in the Bushwick section of Brooklyn.
“Whoooo!” she yelled, squeezing her legs together to increase her speed.
Ms. Ejogo, 45, who plays an English teacher with an air of mystery on the new season of HBO’s moody police serial, “True Detective,” has a few tricks up the sleeves of her Adidas workout top. Here’s one: She is a closet circus enthusiast.
On a break from filming the Netflix thriller “Rattlesnake,” Ms. Ejogo had driven to the Muse, a circus training center on a scruffy block just down the street from a hearse rental agency.
An athlete all through school and a longtime ballet student, Ms. Ejogo loves any exercise “where it starts feeling lyrical and more like a dance,” she said. She stumbled into circus arts when a yoga teacher introduced hanging silks into the class. “It was immediately captivating to me,” she said.
Ms. Ejogo arrived at the Muse at 5 p.m. on a recent Friday, and she stripped down to contemporary athleisure: a black workout top, knit blue leggings and jogging shorts the same color as the silks.
Alisa Mae, her instructor, arrived a few minutes later, in a rose-gold puffer and matching glitter eye shadow. They planned to work on her silks skills and maybe try the lyra, which is a circus apparatus that looks like a dangling hula hoop.
Ms. Ejogo, who stars in “True Detective” is currently filming the Netflix thriller “Rattlesnake.” CreditDolly Faibyshev for The New York Times
While some roustabouts set up for a weekend circus show, Ms. Mae led Ms. Ejogo out to the floor, lit by rickety chandeliers and carpeted in purple and blue athletic mats. They warmed up with jumping jacks, hamstring kicks and shoulder shrugs, then moved on to lunges.
“Your lunge is so long,” Ms. Mae said approvingly. “I love it.”
They sat with their knees butterflied and practiced some straddles and splits. “You’re really bendy,” Ms. Mae said.
“In some places,” Ms. Ejogo said.
Soon, Ms. Mae told Ms. Ejogo to reach for the silks and wrap them around each arm, almost like striping a candy cane. With ferocious concentration, Ms. Ejogo lifted and lowered herself a few times, getting a feel for the silks, while Ms. Mae clocked her upper body strength. “Let’s get upside down and do some fun stuff!” Ms. Mae said.
Ms. Mae then tied the silks together, creating what she called a hammock and settling it near Ms. Ejogo’s lower back. Once Ms. Ejogo was airborne, Ms. Mae gave her leg a shove, sending her into a spin.
Ms. Ejogo plays mostly serious roles — it’s a choice she made early on, in a bid for career longevity — but in person she is “quite playful and a little sort of goofy,” she said. Spinning midair tangled in a scarlet web felt just about right.
“Wicked,” Ms. Ejogo said with broad smile.
Though Ms. Ejogo usually plays American characters, she was born in London, the daughter of a Scottish mother and a Nigerian father. As a teenager, she hosted the children’s morning show “Saturday Disney,” and then moved to the United States, looking for roles that wouldn’t typecast her as the “mixed-race sort of ‘exotic’ pretty girl,” she said.
While filming the 2001 television movie “Boycott” (she played Coretta Scott King, a role she would reprise in “Selma”), Ms. Ejogo met the actor Jeffrey Wright. They soon married and had two children, now teenagers, who occasionally accompany her to trapeze class on the West Side Highway. She and Mr. Wright divorced in 2014.
Now that her children are older, she is working more. She starred in the second season of the Starz drama series “The Girlfriend Experience,” playing a high-end escort who reluctantly enters the witness protection program, and has appeared in both “Fantastic Beasts” (the Harry Potter movies) as a high-ranking witch.
She was hesitant about joining “True Detective.” “I’m a parent, and I don’t really want to indulge in storytelling that is macabre when it comes to children,” she said. But as she read through the scripts, she discovered “something so wonderfully redemptive.”
At the Muse, Ms. Ejogo returned to earth and tried a few more poses, including one where she locked the silks around her feet and stood up like a strung bow.
“Perfect,” Ms. Mae said, as Ms. Ejogo untangled herself. “That was so easy for you, huh?”
It was time to try the lyra. “I’m curious about this guy,” Ms. Ejogo said approaching the ring. Ms. Mae showed her how to grip it with fingers and thumbs, then pull herself into a little ball and swing her upper body, using the momentum to hook her legs over the ring’s edge.
“If it doesn’t happen right away, don’t worry,” Ms. Mae said. “Sometimes people get this their first day. Sometimes people get it in about a month.”
Ms. Ejogo did not want to wait. She gripped the ring and then, with a little assist from Ms. Mae, her legs were up and over, and she was swinging from her knees.
“You totally did it,” Ms. Mae said.
“That was a total cheat,” Ms. Ejogo said.
“You still totally did it.”
For the first time that evening, Ms. Ejogo looked a little unsure, but Ms. Mae cheered her on. “You don’t need me,” she said. “We’re just going to go for a spin Point your toes. You’re flying. You feel good up there?”
“I feel great,” she said.
They tried one more pose in the lyra: Ms. Ejogo sat in the ring and then scooted onto her side, balancing with her hips. “It’s called man in the moon,” Ms. Mae said. “Or person in the moon.”
“So beautiful, so classic, old-school circus,” Ms. Ejogo said.
After two more poses, including a fast spin, she dismounted and then, by way of celebration, dove into a ball pit, like the kind at Chuck E. Cheese’s. She looked like she was soaking in a colorful bubble bath.
“I love it,” she said, as the lyra whirled above her. “I can’t ever get out.”
