Samiul Bashar Samin
When Orange Is the New Black fans began binge-watching season four on Friday, they didn’t have to wait very long for answers on the fate of one of their favorite characters.When viewers last saw Alex Vause, played by Laura Prepon, on the finale of season three, the Litchfield inmate was trapped in the greenhouse with a man from her past who had been sent there to kill her.
“Everyone knows that I’m back, but nobody has any idea what the storyline is going to be,” Prepon tells The Hollywood Reporter while discussing the new season. “You can’t really guess what happens.”
“She’s never personally
had to do that to someone,” says Prepon. “It completely rattles her and it just haunts her.” The trauma, and Alex’s subsequent vulnerability, has her inching her way back to Piper (Taylor Schilling) in what seems to signal a slow-burning reunion — the pair broke up in season three when Piper left Alex for Stella (Ruby Rose). “Alex really needs Piper and needs that relationship to kind of humanize her again,” says Prepon about Alex’s headspace. Piper, meanwhile, experiences her own shocking trauma in episode seven when, after playing “Godfather” of prison, finds herself unintention ally heading up a white-power group and getting branded as a Nazi by the Dominican girls. Led by Maria (Jessica Pimentel), they burn a swastika into her arm.
Viewers will have to keep binging to see how the relationship plays out, but Prepon talks to THR about what the first eight episodes mean for Alex and Piper, what it was like to shoot the insane premiere scene and Alex’s evolution: “At this point, she doesn’t know if she’s a good person or not.”