Five actors at the heart of Netflix’s hit series talk to BuzzFeed News about playing prisoners and bringing nuance to their roles.
Adrienne C. Moore as Black Cindy, Uzo Aduba as Suzanne, and Danielle Brooks as Taystee in a scene from Season 3 of Orange Is the New Black.
Jojo Whilden/Netflix
Some of the funniest and most honest moments in Netflix's hit series Orange Is the New Black happen when a particular combination of characters — Tasha "Taystee" Jefferson (Danielle Brooks), "Black Cindy" Hayes (Adrienne C. Moore), Janae Watson (Vicky Jeudy), Poussey Washington (Samira Wiley), and Suzanne "Crazy Eyes" Warren (Uzo Aduba) — get together.
The audience laughs as they sit around a cafeteria table making up rap songs, whispering about homemade hooch in the library, or answering trivia questions with "the white Michelle Williams." And we cry when they unravel, as we've seen with Aduba's Suzanne, who, in a highly emotional moment, repeatedly slapped herself in the head while she called herself stupid — a moment made all the more heartbreaking considering that her character lacks the same social development as her contemporaries.
Brooks calls the tribe of five the "Chocolate Goddesses." The actors are their own sorority, bounded by race and their impressive (and downright intimidating) academic pedigree — the women all have studied at some of the finest acting institutions in the country, and many can boast a classical Shakespearean training. But on Orange, they're playing a group of black women who — some have argued — are stereotypical, neck-swiveling, wrong-side-of-the-tracks criminals. And that potentially polarizing issue did give several of the actors pause, especially those who were signing up for their very first roles on television.
"When I first started this, I was very skeptical, being that I was a black woman playing an inmate. I was very nervous about that," Brooks told BuzzFeed News in a phone interview. "But … every story is valid, everyone's story. Whether we like to admit that, there's a lot of women that are of African descent that are incarcerated, or people of color who are incarcerated — those are stories that need to be told too. I feel like when they're told so specifically, and so authentically, and stated and done with so much truth, then I'm up for it."
And Orange Is the New Black does just that: All of the characters on the series landed behind bars for very specific and distinct reasons — the good girl gone bad, the drug mule, the airport employee who stole private property, and the list goes on. Yet these women feel fully realized. The beauty is in their backstories of college dreams dashed, the perils of growing up in the foster care system, and what happens when mental illness isn't properly treated.
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