The real-life Alex Vause would much rather be in Netflix’s version of prison than actual prison.
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Former felon, Cleary Wolters, who Laura Prepon‘s character Alex Vause is based on, told HuffPost Live all about what the popular Netflix series gets wrong about prison in real life, and it turns out, it’s a lot.
For one, she said, her real-life romance with Piper Kerman, Taylor Schilling‘s character Piper Chapman on the show, only lasted a few weeks and wasn’t nearly interesting enough to make into a TV show.
“I’m flattered that they picked out me in her life as such an interesting, charismatic character that they had to make a whole backstory about me,” Wolters said. “I never imagined I’d be Donna from That ’70s Show. When I watch that part of the series, I watch it as a viewer. I don’t say, ‘That’s my life.'”
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Wolters, who served 65 months of a 94-month drug smuggling sentence, only spent about five weeks in the same prison facility as Kerman.
“There are hints of reality in the show, and maybe I’m just seeing them because I want to see them so much, but there are things that make me think, ‘Is Piper consulting on this? Is she telling them things?’ The glasses were a dead giveaway [that Laura Prepon is me], so I immediately recognized it in the commercial,” Wolters added. “Taylor Schilling does a great job of being Piper. Piper’s a little less deer in the headlights, though.”
And the other thing that OITNB got all wrong? Sex in a women’s prison. At least, according to Wolter.
“There is sex occurring, but it’s not happening in the showers without a shower curtain,” she said. “If you get caught having sex, you go to… solitary confinement. I never saw it. In fact, I might have stayed had that been the case. There’d be a line to get into prison if it were as fun as Orange Is the New Black shows it to be.”
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