Samira Wiley is a confident person. “Extremely,” she says, with a grin that immediately grows into a full-throated laugh. In the depths of the National Theatre in London, in a meeting room so featureless and business-bland that a member of staff apologises for it, Wiley is a big, bright presence. She talks with her hands. When she listens, she leans back in her chair, arms hanging down at her sides, opening herself up, and when she really wants to make a point, she stretches forward and slaps her palms on the table, holding eye contact. “I am confident. Sometimes to a fault,” she says. “If I’m not totally sure about something, I’m like, I will bet you $500…” She laughs. “I can admit when I’m wrong, though.” She leaves it a beat, then, still grinning, sinks back into her chair. “Sometimes.”
At 35, Wiley is famous for two big TV roles. One, her first real acting job, was in the prison series Orange is the New Black. For four years, she played fan favourite Poussey Washington. After that, she played Moira, an activist turned handmaid turned activist again in the TV adaptation of The Handmaid’s Tale. But she trained as a theatre actor and is about to make her British stage debut in the National Theatre’s revival of Blues for an Alabama Sky. She plays Angel, a down-on-her-luck showgirl in Depression-hit 1930s Harlem.
This is her lunchbreak; she is two weeks into rehearsals. They start work at 10am, but, these days, that is a late start. “I get up pretty early with my daughter,” she explains. Her wife, Lauren Morelli, a writer whom she met on OITNB, has travelled to the UK with her, along with their 16-month-old baby, George. She shows me an adorable picture of George on her phone. “She looks zero like she’s 16 months old,” she beams. “People definitely think she’s two.”
It is Wiley’s first time in the UK, though her mother was born here. She came straight from the set of The Handmaid’s Tale, which has just wrapped season five. “I’ve got two more years on my contract,” she says, sounding as though she’s choosing her wording carefully. It is a ruthless kind of show. Does that mean Moira is going to make it through season five? “Hahahaaa,” she says, not taking the bait. “I don’t know! They don’t tell me!”
It has always been her ultimate goal to appear on Broadway in New York, but she seems delighted to be in London. “There’s this prestige, at least in my mind, that comes with working at the National Theatre of London,” she says. “I thought, once I’m more established, and people really understand that I’m a theatre actor, maybe I’ll get a call…” In fact, the play’s director, Lynette Linton, first called Wiley with the idea in 2019. “I was having conversations about who Angel could be. She just made complete sense,” Linton tells me. The two have become firm friends. “This will sound gushy, but she lights up a room. She’s such a genuine human and that’s why she’s such a good actor.”
The play was due to open in December 2020, but the pandemic kept pushing it back. One of the play’s characters works at a family-planning clinic, while another, a doctor, performs abortions. If it felt timely three years ago, then in the aftermath of the repeal of Roe v Wade, it feels particularly on the nose. Wiley nods. “Trump was still here when we started talking about it. At the time, it didn’t feel like it could get any more timely. I don’t think anyone imagined this is something that could happen, especially as a person that was born after Roe v Wade. I didn’t even understand that something like this could change.”
earrings by sophiebillebrahe.com; and necklace
by alighieri.com. Photograph: Rosaline Shahnavaz/The Observer
Wiley has form for playing characters that have a meaning and life outside the series that created them. In OITNB, Poussey’s death at the hands of a prison officer was a devastating portrait of authoritarian brutality against Black people. In The Handmaid’s Tale, Moira is an activist forced into sexual subjugation under the extremist Gilead regime. “Well, the roles I have played so far on TV, I think they mean something. Specifically, those characters have taught me what I can do with my voice and with roles that I take on.”
People often ask her if she took socially conscious roles on purpose, but she says that’s just how it worked out. “But now I know the power that comes with taking a role like Poussey, like Moira, like Angel, that’s what I want to do.” Does that mean she’ll take parts like this for the rest of her career? “Absolutely. I don’t think there’s any other choice for me, at this point. Like, I’m part of every single marginalised community. I’m Black, I’m gay, I’m a woman.” That grin again, and a wry laugh. “My country hates me! So I do feel like it’s my responsibility, or it’s one that I’ve definitely accepted, to be a voice for all of my different communities.”
Wiley always knew she wanted to be an actor. She grew up in Washington DC. Her parents were both pastors, though they are now retired. She suspects that watching them preach had an influence. “Absolutely, yes. Seeing my parents preach a sermon, I know that’s where I get it from. In essence, it’s getting up there and telling a story.” When she was nine, she heard an advert on the radio for a theatre summer camp. Her parents agreed to send her, and she then went every year for the next decade. “I didn’t have any access to acting, apart from what I was seeing on Nickelodeon and stuff, but I knew I wanted to be one of those kids.” Now, Wiley is on the board of a nonprofit organisation in New York City, called Molière in the Park, which aims to expand access to theatre for all and puts on free productions in Brooklyn. “I really, really, really believe in trying to make theatre more accessible.”
After being rejected from every drama school she applied to – “that was a real confidence bust, for sure” – she ended up at university, where a teacher told her there was one last school she hadn’t tried: the prestigious Juilliard, in New York City. “I was like, look lady, I already did that. I already auditioned everywhere, and it’s not for me.” But she hadn’t tried Juilliard. “I was coming from this intense place of rejection, all these schools saying no, and I was so scared. So I tell my mom and my dad – don’t tell anyone I’m doing this. I just couldn’t stand the fact that if I got rejected, people would know.” Her mother agreed to keep it quiet. “And then she told the entire Wednesday night Bible study and they’re all in church praying to God for me,” she laughs. Whatever it was, it worked out in the end. At 19, she moved to New York.
One of the friends she made at Juilliard was Danielle Brooks, who played Poussey’s best friend, Taystee, in OITNB. It was a coincidence that they were both up for the show, though it did mean that Brooks, who had already been cast, could help Wiley practise her lines. OITNB was one of the first original Netflix series, along with House of Cards, so when it arrived, in 2013, even Wiley wasn’t quite sure what it was. “People would be like, ‘So it’s a web series?’ I’d be like, ‘Uh, I don’t think so? I don’t really know.’”
It was an overnight hit. Its entire first season was released on the same day and with that, the era of binge-watching had dawned. It meant that for the cast, fame was not so much a gradual process as an immediate, life-changing event. “Absolutely instant. Just like that,” says Wiley. She snaps her fingers. “It came out on a Friday and after that weekend, I’ve never had a day where somebody hasn’t recognised me, regardless of what country I’m in.” For many of the cast, it was their first big job. “A lot of them took to it a little more gracefully than I did and embraced it, and liked it, even.” She leans in. “And I hated fame. So much. Poussey is a character everyone loves, so people would violate my personal space a lot, pick me up, kiss my face, try to follow me home, a lot of scary stuff.” For a while after the series was out, Wiley kept her bartending job in New York, until Morelli told her it might be time to hand in her notice. “I was like, ‘People are recognising me, it’s getting weird…’ She was like, ‘Quit!’”
When Poussey is killed by a prison officer, who leans on her neck, towards the end of season four, it devastated many fans. “My wife wrote that episode,” says Wiley. “I remember her calling me because I knew that she was writing it. She was just bawling, crying, and she couldn’t talk. I had no idea what was happening. I’m like, what’s going on? And she goes, I killed her, I just killed her. And I’m like, you killed who? Of course, she meant she had finished the script.”
The episode was written after the deaths of Eric Garner and Michael Brown, both Black men killed by police officers. Wiley knew it was going to have an impact. Many fans were outraged that the show had killed off their favourite character. “But that was the point,” she says. “They always said that was why they used Poussey, because it wouldn’t have had the same impact, if it was a character people weren’t as endeared to.”
Was she ready to leave the show? “It always gets my goat when people say I left,” she smiles. “I know you’re not saying that, you’re asking, but people assume I asked to leave. Not the case.” It was, she says, her first job. She would have stayed forever. But your wife killed you off. How did that go down at home? “Ha! I mean, it was not her decision. She just got assigned it. But we met on the show. I’m a fan of hers. And to know she was going to handle it, I just felt it would be handled with care and thoughtfulness. So I felt better that she was writing it.”
Wiley and Morelli married in 2017, in Palm Springs, California, and the photographs ran, Hello!-style, on lifestyle guru Martha Stewart’s website. Their daughter was born in 2020. “When we first started talking about this play, we weren’t even pregnant,” she says, astonished by the time that has passed. “Not only did we not have a child, we weren’t even pregnant.”
For six months after she left OITNB, she was out of work. Then she was offered the role of Moira in The Handmaid’s Tale. “I remember getting the script and I had no idea who Margaret Atwood was or what The Handmaid’s Tale was. Apparently it was Lauren’s favourite book, which was confusing to me. And the character was gay, which was all that I was focused on,” she says. “In a bad way.”
Wiley had come out to her parents, who were supportive, when she was 20 – they officiated her wedding – and she has done interviews with gay press, though plenty of LGBTQ+ actors choose not to. Did she have any qualms about being out? “It’s interesting,” she says. “I definitely did specifically not talk about it for a while, but people just assumed I was gay. “ Because Poussey is gay? “Yeah, and my Instagram and my gender presentation, and all of that. Also, they weren’t wrong,” she laughs. In 2014, Out magazine asked her to be on their cover, alongside Zachary Quinto, Sam Smith and Elliot Page. “To put my face on the cover of an LGBTQ+ magazine, that felt like the first time I said yes.”
She had been outed before then, by an OITNB castmate. “I read it in an interview that they did, and I just burst into tears. My publicist got it off the internet in 30 minutes, but what’s 30 minutes on the internet? A lifetime. Obviously, no one cared. Everyone already assumed it.” But it was upsetting because it wasn’t your decision? “Because it was mine,” she says. “It was mine. It’s not yours to give someone. I felt like they took something from me.”
She worried that if she took The Handmaid’s Tale part, having played one gay character just before it, she might be typecast. “So much concern on my part,” she says, candidly. “I was like, we’ve seen me do this, I know I can do this, I want to do something else.” Morelli persuaded her otherwise. “My wife was like, if you do gay for anything, you do gay for this. When I think about it now, it’s a little naive to say, I don’t want to play gay, because that’s the heteronormative idea that we’re all the same. Moira is a completely different, fully realised person to Poussey. For me, how powerful is it, to have a Black gay woman portray an actual Black gay woman on TV? I wouldn’t have been able to see that ever, when I was a kid.” Wiley won her first Emmy award for the role, in 2018.
For viewers, it is a harrowing show, a hellish vision of a far-right, religious extremist government seizing power in the US. Is it as much fun to be in as it is to watch? Wiley smiles. “Honestly, I can’t speak highly enough of our fearless leader, Lizzie Moss. She creates an environment on set that has an immense amount of levity. It just doesn’t feel as heavy as that when we’re actually on set.” Besides, she points out, Moira left Gilead in season one. “So I’m not filming those kinds of scenes, ever.”
Again, though, much like her current play, its sense of timeliness only seems to grow. “Obama was president when we started filming the show,” she says. “So in the middle of us filming this show, Trump becomes president. And I just remember going to work on that first day after it happened and feeling this weight of like, oh, what we’re doing is really important.” After the repeal of Roe v Wade, it feels different again. “And there’s so many things that have happened in America that are directly mirrored in the show. They seem like they’re a response, but the writers wrote it before, and we filmed it before. Remember in the show, where everyone’s being separated from their children?” This happens in season one, before Trump’s family-separation policy made headlines in 2018. “I just wanted to be, like, ‘Writers, stop writing. You’re being prophetic, and it’s weird.’” She starts telling me about Margaret Atwood’s emoji game – “She is very efficient” – but lunch is up, and it’s time to go back to work.
Minutes later, in a vast rehearsal room, I watch the actors from the sidelines as they go through an emotional scene, late in the play. Linton guides the cast through a reading. They chat about costumes, how to move and then there’s a run-through. Wiley dims her lights, and disappears into Angel completely.
Blues for an Alabama Sky runs at the National Theatre, London, from 20 September to 5 November
Fashion by Jo Jones; hair by Dionne Smith using Cantu Beauty; makeup by Kenneth Soh at The Wall Group using Charlotte Tilbury Makeup; styling assistant Roz Donoghue; photographer’s assistant Jem Rigby; shot at Fulham Palace
