“I think about when I was a young girl, [what it would have meant] to be able to look up to people who I could identify with, and to see them in positions of power and in positions of doing what I wanted to do”
Poussey — Samira Wiley’s breakout role on Orange Is the New Black — was like a heat-seeking missile aimed at the viewer’s heart. Funny, endearing, and ultimately tragic, Poussey was an irrepressible ray of optimism who managed to not let prison life harden her. Still, after finishing her run on the show, Wiley wasn’t looking to take on the role of another imperiled lesbian. “I was definitely afraid of being typecast,” she told me over breakfast in Tribeca.
Their picket-fence domesticity is just one reminder of how powerful it can be when norms change before your eyes — something Wiley has also come to appreciate in her career. “It’s interesting to see that my journey started with Orange, because it really is a place where people always talk about how progressive, and innovative, and different, and groundbreaking it is,” she said. “But it was my norm. I was surrounded by all these powerful women, and that’s what I thought TV was.
What followed was a period of upheaval that neither Morelli nor Wiley could have imagined. OITNB became a cultural phenomenon, putting Netflix on the map and making a star out of Wiley, who couldn’t pick up a coconut water at her local bodega without being stopped for a picture. And at the same time Wiley was dealing with her new fame, Morelli was grappling with her sexual orientation.
“For Offred, in a lot of situations, the question is WWMD: What would Moira do?” Wiley told me. “You see why Offred loves, and misses, and wants to emulate this person, and how Offred taking on some of Moira’s traits is a really good thing. I think a lot of me — Samira — wants to take on some of those things from Moira, too, in terms of just speaking out.”
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