Samira Wiley: ‘I had no idea what I was doing on Orange is the New Black’

“Black sex workers and white women from high society? They both wanted the same undergarments in New York at the turn of the 20th century,” says Samira Wiley. She thinks this “mirrors” the way the haves and have-nots of today covet elements of each others’ lifestyles. The rich craving street cred, the poor pining for designer labels.

The 38-year-old American actor – best known for TV roles in Netflix’s prison drama Orange is the New Black (2013-19) and Hulu’s The Handmaid’s Tale (2017-25) – is talking on a break from rehearsals for a new British production of Lynn Nottage’s 2003 play Intimate Apparel, in which she stars as an expert seamstress selling the same lacy lingerie to both Southern Belles and piano-playing prostitutes.

Unlike Wiley – confidently loose-limbed in her backwards baseball cap as she rocks towards her laptop camera – Nottage’s heroine, Esther, is a shy and lonely character. Brooklyn-born Nottage (the only woman to have won the Pulitzer prize twice) has a reputation as a Big P political playwright, but her work has always been more slippery and delicately layered than the headlines make it sound. Written in the wake of her mother’s death, Intimate Apparel was inspired by an old passport photograph of her great-grandmother, of whose real life almost nothing had been recorded. Esther was her fictional attempt to explore her female lineage.

Wiley, left, with Claudia Jolly in ‘Intimate Apparel’ at the Donmar Warehouse, London (Photo: Helen Murray)

“Esther was born in North Carolina in 1870 – that’s just seven years after the Emancipation Proclamation freed all the enslaved people in the Confederate states,” explains Wiley. “So she is the daughter of enslaved people. She transplanted her life to New York at the age of 17 and by the time we meet her there in 1905 she’s been living in the same boarding house for almost 20 years. She has watched 22 other young women move in, couple up, leave and marry…” The actor exhales and shakes her head.

“Being an unmarried woman at that age, in that time, makes her vulnerable,” Wiley continues. “It’s a point of shame that she doesn’t have the security that a man could give her. But she finds her self-worth comes through being a working person, a self-employed craftswoman. I’ve come to think of her as a tree: quiet, rooted and comfortable being in the background.”

This is the opposite of the way Wiley grew up. Born in Washington DC in 1987, the daughter of two pastors in the Covenant Baptist Church of Christ, she recalls a childhood in which she was aware of “being observed”. Looking back she compares being the child of church leaders to “a microcosm of the White House, in a way. You’re the ‘First Kid’ of the church.” She laughs, warmly. “Being in the black church, there is a lot about clothing. They place importance on how you show up for God. So I wore lots of frilly dresses, which I loved, loved, LOVED when I was a kid, although I don’t wear that kind of thing now.”

Watching her “inspirational” parents with their congregation, Wiley learned both the art of performance and power of progressive politics. “I saw how a sermon could get people leaning forward in their seats,” she says. “And unusually for members of the black Baptist church, my parents were at the forefront of so many social movements. I think they were leading same-sex union ceremonies in 2004 – long [eight years] before [gay] marriage was legal in Washington.” So although Wiley did not come out as gay in public until seven years ago (for fear the revelation would affect casting), she came out to her parents at the age of 20, and they led the ceremony in which she wed Orange is the New Black writer Lauren Morelli in 2017.

Wiley, right, as the goofy, kind-hearted Poussey Washington in ‘Orange is the New Black’ (Photo: JoJo Whilden/Netflix)

Reflecting on meeting Morelli back on OITNB, Wiley recalls their romance started as “a talent crush”. Although she had graduated from the prestigious Juilliard drama school shortly before landing the part of Poussey Washington, the actor admits that “because theatre was my first love” she initially felt out of her depth on a TV set. “I had no idea what I was doing. I remember worrying if I was speaking too loud, when to turn my face toward the camera.”

Poussey – a goofy, kind-hearted prison inmate whose death at the hands of a prison officer in season four caused a huge outcry and a litany of think-pieces – was a firm fan favourite. Wiley chuckles over the disorientation of creating backstories for her character that the writers would later unpick. “During my first season I invented this whole backstory for Poussey. I had imagined that her mother was very involved in her life and would come visit her in prison every month. Then in the penultimate episode she had a monologue about how her mum had been dead for six years. News to me!”

Morelli – who had married a man shortly before pulling up her chair in the OITNB writers’ room – had begun to realise she was gay in the early weeks on the show’s set. The writer began voicing her feelings through the series lead character Piper: married to a man but incarcerated in the same prison as her ex-girlfriend. Wiley and Morelli bopped out of their wedding in Palm Springs to Montell Jordan’s “This Is How We Do It”, and Morelli gave birth to their daughter, George Elizabeth, in 2021.

In 2022, Wiley told The Guardian that as a black, gay woman she felt “my country hates me”. But today she rows back a little on that sentiment, wincing a little as she recalls how “that quote went really far”. Although I want to talk about how the racist, misogynistic attitudes explored in both OITNB and The Handmaid’s Tale (in which she played activist Moira) are manifesting in modern America, Wiley says she has hardly spent any time in the US since the last election. “I’ve been in Canada and now the UK.”

Wiley as activist Moira in ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’ (Photo: Steve Wilkie/Disney)

Although she’s been guilty of doom-scrolling news feeds in the past, she says she’s come to the conclusion that “art in general is the antidote to however people are feeling and that is what I am focusing on now”. Nottage’s play has also prompted her to think about the control she has over her own life. “As women, being able to say ‘no’ is important,” she says. “As a black person in 1905 there was so much you HAD to say yes to without thinking.”

For her own part, Wiley has learned that “after the fact is not too late”. So if she finds she has overcommitted herself, “I can now go back to somebody and say, ‘I know we agreed to this or that, but actually I am doing this play right now. I am in eight hours of rehearsal a day and I can no longer make time for it.’ I’ve not been on the stage for three years” – since winning rave reviews for Blues for an Alabama Sky at the National Theatre in 2022 – “and that is exercising a different muscle.”

On the flipside, she has learned to accept her fame with more positive grace. “I found it very, very hard at first,” she says. “It’s still hard for me. But I have had many years of figuring out how to deal with it – resistance to that is only gonna make my life harder. I had to accept it and try to find grace in walking my path.”

She says that members of the public have “many different reactions” to seeing her in public and she has to remind herself that “it all comes from something they saw in a performance that they connected with. It’s weird, but it’s an event to see somebody in real life you see on TV, right? This might happen to me multiple times a day but it can be a singular event in somebody else’s life.” She’s aware that Poussey meant “a great deal to the queer community. For people to see a character who looks like me, loves like me on television? That kind of affirmation is invaluable.”

Wiley loved Poussey as much as her fans did. She also loved Moira of The Handmaid’s Tale. “I fall madly in love with all my characters,” she says. “That’s essential for me to be able to tell an honest story about them: holding on to all the positive qualities and leaving other people to have other opinions.” As she slips into Esther’s world – “all those corsets, petticoats and bloomers!” – she realises she’s “just at the point of falling in love again.”