10 Surprising Early Roles Of Orange Is The New Black Stars
Wait, Alex Vause was in Halo 2?
Netflix's Orange Is The New Black has one of the greatest casts on television. Though the show mostly revolved around Piper in the beginning, it quickly shifted focus to all of the other inmates, and these characters are so interesting and refreshingly honest. It's one of the few things on TV where there are literally dozens of characters you care about and who you become invested in over the course of the series.
For a lot of the actresses on the show, Orange Is The New Black was their first major role - just look at the emergent talent behind Poussey, Taystee, and Crazy Eyes. But a large portion of the cast has been acting for years, some appearing in a few big things you might have forgotten and others just popping up in small roles all over the place.
After connecting with their characters on Orange Is The New Black, it can be pretty surprising to go back and see them acting decades ago and realise you actually have seen all of these people before; you just didn't know who they were yet. From the talent behind Piper and Red to Pennsatucky and Alex, here are 10 surprising early roles of the Orange Is The New Black cast.
10. Taylor Schilling - Dark Matter And Mercy
Taylor Schilling got her start in Hollywood only six years before landing the role of Piper Chapman. She graduated from Fordham in 2006, and just one year later she was cast in a movie alongside Meryl Streep. Not bad for an actor just getting her start.
The movie was Dark Matter, an independent film directed by Chen Shi-zheng. Schilling plays a pretty minor character, Jackie, but it was still enough to get her foot in the door in Hollywood. Her first big break was as the lead in the NBC medical drama Mercy, which was pretty exciting for a childhood fan of ER.
In the show she played Veronica Callahan, a tough nurse who has just returned from Iraq at the beginning of the series. Schilling does a pretty good job in it, but the show received mixed reviews and was ultimately cancelled at the end of its first season due to poor ratings.
Schilling dabbled in film for a bit with Atlas Shrugged and Argo, and then, in 2013, landed her Orange Is The New Black role.