The fifth season of Netflix's multi-award-winning show Orange Is the New Black continues on from the blockbuster ending to season four, when the inmates started to riot after Poussey is killed accidentally.
The new episodes are about the lives of the female prisoners as the riot rages, and take place over the course of just three days.
“This season has the challenge of time,” says Danielle Brooks, who plays the number guru Tasha ‘Taystee’ Jefferson. “How are we going to handle something that we shoot over the course of six to seven months that is condensed into three days on screen?”
“I was excited by the formal challenge of it,” says actor Laverne Cox, who plays hairdresser Sophia Burset. “I felt like [show creator] Jenji Kohan was continuing to push the storytelling envelope, not just in terms of storyline, but also in the way we tell stories.”
But that’s not to say the narrative arc of the characters will be any less exhilarating on what is Netflix’s most popular original series.
“I think for Sophia a lot can happen in three days,” says Cox. “Especially as the circumstances are heightened, so a lot does happen and she definitely has a full arc.”
Brooks adds: “For Taystee, this is not the first person she has lost in Litchfield. She has lost Vee, her biological parents abandoned her, and so for her to now lose the one person who showed her what love and loyalty really looks like only sparked a fire in her, I think, which then results in her starting to riot.”
But the divisions and cliques so familiar in the previous seasons soon appear. “Then you get to see these girls come together and fight for justice,” says Brooks.
“We think we have the same agenda, but do we really have the same gender? What are people’s motives and what are we fighting for?”
It is impossible to watch the new series – which was filmed at the time of the United States presidential campaign – without drawing real-life parallels. Even if the new series feels at times it belongs to the horror genre, far from the comic beginnings that launched the first season.
“It’s very exciting to be part of a show that really speaks to the circumstances of the time,” says Cox.
“When we started shooting the Philando Castile murder had just happened and Alton Sterling was murdered and we have this season which is a reaction to the shooting of one of our own by the police. And now post-election when there is a strong resistance movement happening and we see these women in Litchfield resisting.”
It’s survival of the fittest, says Natasha Lyonne, who plays sarcastic vulture Nicky Nichols. “We are having conversations about how full of fear we are and it’s so easy to draw parallels between this season being a state of Lord of the Flies and this coming together to stand up against injustice and glaring abuses of power by authority.”
It is intriguing to see a riot at Litchfield, given the regularity that they occur in prisons in the United States. In doing so the show is holding a mirror up to the world.
“I think it’s impossible to strip this show from the world in which it’s created,” adds Taylor Schilling, who plays middle-class inmate Piper Chapman.
Schilling adds: “We are dealing with a real issue, we are dealing with the prison system in the US, so what happens in real life definitely impacts upon the show.”
And what happens in the show is the topic of conversation in real life.
• Netflix’s Orange Is the New Black season five is from June 9
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