What's it like to play the villain on the most talked-about show of the summer? Orange Is the New Black star Laura Prepon wouldn't know — because she doesn't see her character, Alex Vause, in that light.
"When the show first starts, you think that ... Alex is this evil person," Prepon admits. "And then as the show progresses .... you start to see that Alex — at the end of the day, yes, she's a drug dealer — but you see that she's a vulnerable person and she has really intense feelings and love for [Piper]."
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There's something really special happening in television right now. Jenji Kohan'sOrange Is the New Black not only features a nearly all-female cast depicting a diverse spectrum of race, sexuality and body types, but it also includes a trans woman of color actually playing a trans woman of color — a first on mainstream television.
Former reality star and producer Laverne Cox plays Sophia Burset, a firefighter whose wife Crystal is less disturbed by her transition than her decision to steal credit cards.
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Remakes (House of Cards) and reboots (Arrested Development) are one way to go when establishing a brand — let's just forget about the atrocious Hemlock Grove for now — but with Orange Is the New Black, Netflix finally achieves its eureka moment with a terrifically entertaining piece of original programming that's truly and bracingly original.
The setting, an upstate New York women's prison, isn't all that new, but Orange — adapted by Weeds' Jenji Kohan from a memoir by Piper Kerman — makes it fresh by mining a deep vein of absurdist humor with an unexpectedly generous empathy for the outrageous characters its overwhelmed heroine encounters in her nightmare odyssey behind bars. When anxious Piper Chapman (a wryly understated and immediately sympathetic Taylor Schilling) is being processed to start her 15-month sentence, she's assured this isn't OZ — and it also isn't Chained (or Caged) Heat. This show is much cooler than that.
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Orange is the New Black might not have the hype of Arrested Development or House of Cards, but it is by far the most satisfying original series Netflix has released this year.
From Weeds creator Jenji Kohan, Orange follows Piper Chapman (Taylor Schilling), an upper-middle class woman who finds herself incarcerated for a crime she committed 10 years prior. But Kohan isn't simply rehashing the same pampered, fish-out-of-water angle of Weeds for another suburban satire. This time, Kohan uses the familiar white protagonist as a medium through which to tell stories of those typically marginalized in mainstream media.
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Netflix has renewed its new summer series Orange Is the New Black before it even premieres, Deadline.com reports.
The series...
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