Following the standout success of Orange Is the New Black, actress TAYLOR SCHILLING is now firmly on the A-list. She talks to CHRISTINE LENNON about why it feels good to be a renegade.
Taylor Schilling wanders into LA’s Beachwood Cafe, a cozy diner perched a few streets below the Hollywood Sign, about 20 minutes late. Her pale-blond bob is disheveled. In a chambray shirt, cropped black pants and chunky black loafers, she projects the air of the displaced Brooklynite that she is. The overall impression of the 30-year-old actress, star of the acclaimed Netflix drama Orange Is the New Black (ointb), about life in a women’s correctional facility, is that she is comically, adorably lost. “I was on the 101,” she says with a bemused smirk, noticeably rattled by the infamous Angeleno traffic. “I’m not sure why I was on the 101, but I was there. I was on it.”
Schilling, who lives in New York, is in LA for a number of reasons. Ahead of the show’s third season, which returned to screens this month, she has a packed week of interviews, appearances and fittings. She is also promoting The Overnight, a racy indie comedy written and directed by Patrick Brice that premiered with considerable buzz at this year’s Sundance Film Festival. And, following a well-received stint on Broadway in Ivan Turgenev’s A Month in the Country, opposite Game of Thrones’ Peter Dinklage, she is headed to the desert for a much-needed retreat in Joshua Tree. Despite the hectic schedule (and an occasional detour onto the freeway), she’s happy to be here.
“I am an East Coast person through and through,” says Schilling, who was born and raised in Massachusetts, and has lived in New York since attending Fordham University’s Lincoln Center. “But I like coming here to blend in. And my plan, after I’m done with Orange, is to relocate here. But who knows when that will be?” she adds. “I might be 80, still in prison.”
Few programs in recent memory have captured our collective attention the way that OITNB has, and the phenomenon shows no sign of slowing down. It became a sensation almost overnight and, as a result, Schilling is one of those rare creatures who seems to have become incredibly famous in the blink of an eye. She hasn’t given many interviews and hasn’t been officially linked to anyone romantically. She’s an enigma, even to herself; she talks about “getting to know” herself better. She speaks in dreamy, fractured sentences and has seemingly no vanity, occasionally reaching up to absent-mindedly re-muss her hair, and doesn’t appear to be wearing much more than lip balm and a dab or two of concealer.
“Who knows how different I would be if I had to go to work every day on a studio lot, like so many of the television actors out here, with all of the pageantry,” she says. While she may be a pretty, blue-eyed blond on the outside, what is happening on the inside clearly defies easy categorization. “I think I was just born rogue,” Schilling says with a smile.
For much of her childhood, Schilling split her time between her divorced parents in West Roxbury and Wayland. Her mother is an administrator at Massachusetts Institute of Technology; her father is a former state prosecutor, now in private practice. Her childhood was “unpredictable”, she says. “My parents did not have a good relationship. There was no sense of, ‘This is where you belong. This is how you have a friend over for a tea party. This is how you go to a dance.’ It was chaotic. I thought, well, I might as well go off-map.”
She gravitated to the theater, auditioned for school plays and landed at Fordham, then New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts graduate school. “I appreciate what I learned there,” she says. “[It made me] unafraid of the stage. I’m not afraid of Chekhov or Shakespeare. But I thought, ‘How much more theory can we talk about?’ I had to spread my wings.”
She left after her second year, and just four months later was cast as the lead in 2009’s short-lived drama Mercy, in which she played a nurse returned from a tour of duty in Iraq. “I had never set foot on a television stage before, and I was numero uno on the call sheet,” she says. “There are people in this business who have been working since they were children, and they’re pros by 24. But that wasn’t me. It was very hard. I felt a lot of responsibility. I felt like I wasn’t able to bring it.”
She then starred in The Lucky One, a tearjerking adaptation of the Nicholas Sparks novel, co-starring Zac Efron. “It was another big break,” she says. “And it also felt like, ‘This is not me.’” Next, she played the long-suffering wife of Ben Affleck’s character in the 2012 Oscar-winning drama Argo. And then came OITNB.
Fate intervened when Schilling was presented with the part of Piper Chapman, a preppy Connecticut woman who ends up in prison because of illegal escapades with an ex-girlfriend. Piper Kerman’s memoir, Orange Is the New Black: My Year in a Women’s Prison, inspired the show, and in the hands of creator Jenji Kohan – a hero of Schilling’s – the actress knew things would be interesting. Blue-eyed blonds are rarely cast as such original characters, and Schilling could relate to Kerman.
“There are expectations people have of blond-haired, blue-eyed girls, and that’s to be good,” Schilling says. “That’s how Piper grew up. She was meant to follow the rules: marry a man, have a baby and a business that her mother approves of. [But] the center could not hold. And now she’s scrambling to put the pieces back together to find out who she is, and it doesn’t fit in the mold.”
Though Schilling’s background was less conventional, she relates to the feeling of not fitting in. “It’s an asset and it’s a liability,” she explains. “It can feel painful to be on the outside looking in, and it can be incredibly liberating to say, ‘Alright, I’ve got nothing to lose.’”
That fearlessness is a trait that the entire OITNB cast – which is largely female, including a transgender woman, and racially diverse in a way that is atypical for Hollywood – seems to share. The women have become unlikely cool kids in an industry that’s as cliquish as a school lunchroom. “They challenge what it means to be an ‘It’ girl,” Schilling agrees. “We’re a motley crew. We have so much fun together.”
Because of OITNB’s success, Schilling has felt encouraged to take on other parts that speak to her inner nonconformist. That is what attracted her to The Overnight, which begins as a story about a married couple with a child, struggling to connect to each other, but becomes something infinitely funnier and weirder. “I’m curious to see how people respond to the film,” says Schilling, “because I feel like it’s a different part of who I am. There’s a renegade in me. I honor that now and say, ‘Let’s stoke that fire.’”
Schilling projects a quirky confidence in person that her classic beauty, soft voice and on-screen presence challenge, like the women she idolizes, such as Jessica Lange and Blythe Danner, who played Schilling’s mother in The Lucky One and has since become a friend. These strong women make unpredictable choices – whether challenging sexual norms or addressing socioeconomic issues, as OITNB does – that have nothing to do with the way they look. As for her relatively sudden ascent to fame, Schilling is self-deprecating. “I don’t think I’m there yet. There’s so much more I want to do.” There is a glint of possibility in her eye. “I feel ready for anything.”
The Overnight is out now
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