Jill Greenberg/Netflix(NEW YORK) — Taylor Schilling is perfect at playing a Smith College graduate turned imprisoned drug smuggler inOrange Is the New Black. The actress said her unconventional childhood helped her tap into such an unconventional character.
“I think I was just born rogue,” she told Net-a-Porter’s The Edit. “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.”
Schilling added that it was her carefree outlook on life that gave her the courage to leave New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts as a sophomore and pursue acting.
“I appreciate what I learned there. [It made me] unafraid of the stage,” she added. “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.”
Before landing her role on Orange Is the New Black, the actress said she didn’t have it easy.
“There are people in the business who have been working since they were children, and they’re pros by 24. But that wasn’t me,” she explained. “It was very hard. I felt a lot of responsibility. I felt like I wasn’t able to bring it.”
Schilling eventually landed her role as Piper Chapman on the hit series,the third season of which is now available on Netflix. It’s a character she loves to portray because she can relate to many of the hurdles Piper jumps.
“There are expectations people have of blond-haired, blue-eyed girls and that’s to be good. 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,” she said. “[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.”
“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,'” she added.
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