‘Orange Is the New Black’: Caged Heat

Taylor Schilling has been to a lot of therapy. “So much,” she says on a recent Sunday stroll along the Hudson River, near her apartment in Manhattan. “So much therapy.” As such, the 30-year-old, whose face is makeupless and guileless in the sun glinting off the water, is supremely well-adjusted. She does not drink. She does not publicly discuss her personal life — who she’s dating, why so much therapy — other than to say, “If you’re really living it, life is complicated.” She is grounded in her petite frame, speaking and walking very slowly, and, as a nice person, worries for my job security if I don’t come away with something exciting to say about her. “Let’s see how we can get you something that’s fun but that’s not ‘how I lost my virginity,’ ” she says, but ultimately can’t think of anything juicy. Except maybe to wonder why her bosses haven’t hooked her up. “I’m paying for fucking Netflix,” she says. “I wanted to talk to somebody about that.”

In short, Schilling is not fucked up, unlike her Orange Is the New Black character, convicted drug-money-smuggling Piper Chapman, who is at turns clueless and manipulative and superior. Schilling calls her “not particularly endearing,” but she has nevertheless captivated audiences as the lead of Netflix’s biggest cultural hit since it started pumping hundreds of millions of dollars into original content. In its second season, the show became the most-watched series on Netflix, which has more than 60 million subscribers worldwide. Last year, “Piper” was on the list of most common baby names for girls.

Likable or not, Piper is exactly what Schilling was looking for. Raised in Boston by professional-class parents, Schilling dropped out of a grad-school arts program to audition for roles, and got some — on NBC’s short-lived Mercy, in Argo, even in a Nicholas Sparks vehicle that had her making out with Zac Efron. “I wanted to do stuff that I believed in,” she says. “But roles for women can really be like an appendage to someone else. It’s either the best friend or a girlfriend — you’re not at the seat of your own narrative.” She had decided she wasn’t going to take parts like that anymore, period, even if it took her offscreen. She was prepared to work in low-rent theater. Possibly she’d have spent a lot of time “reevaluating” at her grandmother’s house, in Maine.

“It’s funny, when you totally are just like, ‘I am pbbbtt‘ ” — she blows a raspberry — “that’s when things come in. I wasn’t reading very many scripts, but my agent was like, ‘This is a really great script,’ and she was right. There were so many different parts of this lady,” Schilling says about her role. “She wasn’t defined by any one thing.”

This is why Orange Is the New Black, which has won more than 20 awards for its adaptation of Piper Kerman’s memoir about her year in a women’s prison, is not just a popular show but a historic event: It has ladies in it. Ladies who are doing things we never see ladies in entertainment do — the highest bar for which is currently just interacting with other ladies about topics that don’t revolve around men. Orange — as the cast abbreviates it — is full of killing, fucking, supporting, loving, scheming, desperately masturbating ladies, living in a prison system we generally try hard to forget about, played by actresses we don’t often see either.