Orange is the New Black's Taylor Schilling. Photo / AP
Taylor Schilling, Netflix’s biggest breakout star, talks prison life, Orange Is The New Black and sudden fame with Christopher Goodwin.
Being called a "gateway drug" may not sound so flattering. But as Taylor Schilling takes a seat across from me in the restaurant of the Paris hotel where she's briefly staying, I can see why Jenji Kohan, creator of the hit Netflix series Orange Is The New Black, has described her star this way.
Kohan knew that Schilling, 30, who has the corn-fed looks of Grace Kelly and the comic timing of Mary Tyler Moore, was just the actress she needed to seduce viewers into her addictive series, a riotous, raucous comedy-drama set in an American women's prison.
Schilling plays the yuppie fish-out-of-water inmate Piper Chapman, who is serving a 15-month sentence for laundering drug money 10 years earlier.
What's also great - and radical - about Orange is that it's populated by the most extraordinarily diverse group of female characters, races, ages, sexual orientations and body shapes ever assembled on a television screen. Their stories, and the frequent flashbacks that reveal how they ended up in the slammer, make for combustible, hilarious and often steamy viewing, with dollops of girl-on-girl action and frequent nudity.
Schilling laughs when she recalls Kohan's description of her. "Gateway drug! You really meant it," she remembers saying to Kohan. "There was a part of me that had to adjust to that, but I was excited by what the series became last year. It shows a world that's much more akin in its diversity to the world I see when I walk down the street in New York, the one I know as a human being, than what is usually represented on screen."
Audiences have embraced characters such as the unstable but poetic Crazy Eyes, who becomes obsessed with Piper and calls her Dandelion; the haughty transgendered Sophia, who committed credit-card fraud to pay for her sex change; and Red, a ruthless Russian matriarch with a heart of gold. Piper is a china doll in this bullish shop, often selfish and manipulative as she negotiates prison life; and Schilling, who seems to register every fleeting emotion across her pretty face, acknowledges that "people are much more ambivalent towards Piper than they are towards some of the other characters. She's an anomaly, a kind of anti-hero, and that's discordant with what people are used to with lead female characters.
"It's strange, because people ask me, 'How does it feel that people don't like Piper?' I think, 'Would you ask that of Jon Hamm? How does it feel that people don't like Don Draper?' It's so fascinating to me."
I wonder whether the articulate, passionate Schilling sees Orange as an overtly feminist project. "I think the most radical thing is that it just tells people's stories and leaves it at that," she says. "It is so compelling and so interesting to watch, and so relatable and so eye-opening, that the fact that they are women is inconsequential to how engaging the story is.
"That is the most feminist thing about the show - that it doesn't identify as a feminist show."
Orange Is The New Black was the fourth original series from the online streaming service Netflix, and quickly became its most watched series when it debuted in 2013, besting the political drama House of Cards, starring Kevin Spacey. Orange has already received several nominations and awards, including an Emmy nomination for best actress in a comedy for Schilling. Kohan had previously produced Weeds, which starred Mary-Louise Parker as a middle-class woman who becomes a marijuana dealer to support her family after her husband dies.
By releasing all 13 episodes at once, Netflix encouraged binge-viewing and changed the way television is watched. Schilling is still stunned that she went from being almost completely unknown to ridiculously famous over a single weekend. "Things went bonkers," she recalls. "It's wild. It's weird."
Schilling comes from a middle-class East Coast family - her father has been a prosecutor and assistant district attorney - and studied theatre at Fordham University and in the graduate programme at New York University. In her mid-20s she won some decent roles, but nothing clicked. Her first TV series, the hospital drama Mercy, was cancelled. She was the lead in the 2011 movie Atlas Shrugged, based on the cult novel by Ayn Rand, but correctly describes the film as "a disaster". Most of her scenes were cut from Argo, in which she played Ben Affleck's wife. She also starred in a film with Meryl Streep that was canned because it echoed the massacre at Virginia Tech.
It wasn't until 2012, when she starred with Zac Efron in The Lucky One, adapted from the Nicholas Sparks book, that she had her first hit. Earlier this year, she was well received in an off-Broadway production of Turgenev's A Month in the Country. Now, as well as the third season of Orange, Schilling is in The Overnight, a largely improvised comedy in which she plays a young wife invited to dinner with her husband by a couple who turn out to be swingers.
Although Orange is fictional, it is loosely based on Orange Is The New Black: My Year in a Women's Prison, a memoir by Piper Kerman. In the 1990s, the middle-class, university-educated Kerman helped launder money for her then girlfriend - the fictional character Alex - who was smuggling drugs for a West African kingpin. It wasn't until a decade later that Kerman, then living a very different life and in a relationship with a man whom she later married, was arrested and sentenced.
After season one, Kerman took Schilling to the women's prison on Rikers Island, in New York. "I was shocked by how much it paralleled what we were doing - the dynamics between the women, having prison moms and daughters and family groups and romantic relationships and antagonisms.
"She's a powerful lady and has worked on significant prison reform," Schilling says of Kerman.
"I feel really lucky to know her. But when we started the show, Jenji made it really clear that Piper was fictional, which was liberating."
Schilling describes her character as a woman who had always lived by Waspy, middle-class social rules she didn't even know she was following. "Seasons one and two were more or less her having everything stripped away, so that she begins to see what's left, to see who she really is. This season [season three] she's spreading her wings, feeling more powerful, trying things out to see how they feel."
I wonder whether Schilling, given her middle-class background, had felt the pressure to conform to similar social norms when she was growing up.
"Not from my parents, because I grew up with a different set of expectations," she says. "But I think, like a lot of women, I internalised a sense of what's right and what's wrong - that this is what's expected of me, this is what I should look like, I am valuable if I do this or if I do that.
"In my experience, all those expectations cultivate a lot of pain and suffering, because they end up tying shame to who you really are. If you have impulses that go against those things, that produces a sense of being wrong. The more I get to know anyone, no one lines up with what you think they are - no one! It's pretty cool, actually."
As much as she loves working on Orange, Schilling is ambivalent about the nudity in the show, which pinned its knickers to the mast in the first episode, with a nude shower scene between Piper and Alex. "I don't talk to my family about the nudity at all!" she says in horror. "Never the twain shall meet. And I do get nervous about it. I really have to understand why I am doing it, and it has to parallel the emotional stakes ... Although, in prison, it's not hard to make that happen." Orange has made Schilling recognised almost everywhere she goes, including Paris and Berlin, where she has been promoting the new season. Along with Piper, she has become something of an icon, particularly for younger female fans going through their own crises of identity and sexuality. "On the street, it's cool," she says. "Young girls, teenagers, come up to me a lot and say how much the show inspires them and makes them feel more comfortable with who they are. What could be more beautiful than that?"
Trailer: Orange is the New Black season three trailer
Does she feel any pressure to be a role model? "I have such an ambivalent relationship with the idea of people who are in the public eye being role models," she says after a long pause. "What I hope for my whole life is that I am endlessly becoming and shape-shifting and discovering new parts of myself.
"I feel like, when you put an idea out into the world, it can carry more weight than it is intended to, and people may grab onto and harden something that should be malleable and shifting. So I am wary. I think the most interesting thing to do is to live your life and see what comes of that."
Season 3 of Orange Is the New Black is available now on Netflix; The Overnight is in cinemas later this year.
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