What Laura Prepon Talks About When OITNB Comes Up

When you work on a show as hotly anticipated as Orange is The New Black , you're going to get asked a lot of questions. Especially about what's to come. And that goes extra for someone like Laura Prepon, whose character, Alex Vause, has been the subject of many a fodder piece. So what do you talk about when you can't talk about it the show you're on that people want to talk to you about? Especially after that season two trailer hit the web? Riff and appreciate the obsessive love that comes with the Netflix series' format, natch.

After conflict forced Prepon's hand — "It's pretty black and white: I had a conflict with my schedule and there’s only one of me" — the Internet went crazy. "It's so funny because everybody’s into the mystery of what happened and making up all these stories," Prepon explained to us in an interview. But "I told Jenji [Kohan, the series creator], 'Girl, I'm going to figure it out so that I can be in as many episodes as I can.' And I already worked it out that if we get a season three I'm totally there in every episode."

Making it harder was likely the fact that, well: the cast of the show can't really talk about anything. "There's really not much we can say," explained Prepon. And that's no overstatement: as a showrunner, Kohan is a bit notorious for keeping storyline tabs very close to the vest and OITNB is no exception. So how does one fill the time, then, when details, spoilers, and insights are nowhere to be found? There's only so many times an actor can say "I can't really comment on that."

Well as it so happens, it's that same obsessive love that has been the saving grace. Memes have become a big part of series discussion in spoilers' stead. With a level of pull-out-your-monocle-and-dissect intensity seemingly tailor-made for the Internet's binge-happy obsessive nature, people will focus on the most random of details and make it a 'thing,' for lack of a better term. "It's funny because I talked to Natasha [Lyonne] about this and she’s like 'you know I never really thought of my hair being a thing, but now the Nicky Nichols big hair is a thing. It's like I take it off at the end of the day and put it in a box.' Because it's so popular there's all this attention put on these different things now. It changes things a little bit."

In a good way, though, according to Prepon. "It's pretty crazy but it's awesome [because] I experience that with shows, too. You spend all this time watching it consecutively and you get really, really into these characters. As a viewer I know how that happens, so I can see how people get like that with our show. I get like that with other shows! I will literally stay up an entire night watching a season of a show and get obsessed with these characters." So don't worry, folks: you're far from alone.

Oh yeah, and as for that tidbit about season two? This is all you're gonna get: "What's cool about season two is you get to explore a lot of the inmates and see a lot of the cool backstories." June 6th is just around the corner, folks. Pretty soon you'll know it all.