Orange Is The New Black: 10 Characters More Interesting Than Piper

7. Sophia

The main role of Sophia is to be the hairdresser to her fellow Litchfield inmates, which doesn€™t sound all of that interesting (although at least conversations have to extend beyond awkwardly discussing holidays and the weather), but there€™s a lot more to her than that. Sophia is a post-op transgender, who before her transition was a firefighter named Marcus, and had a wife and a son. The reason she ended up in prison was because of credit card theft, which she only did to pay for her surgery, and she retained the support of her wife throughout the process. It€™s an underrepresented area on TV, but the excellent portrayal by Laverne Cox, in what must be a challenging role, is helping to make up for that, and she was rewarded with an Emmy nomination in 2014.