Samira Wiley Confesses That She Cried When ‘OITNB’ Costar Accidentally Outed Her In Interview

Samira Wiley didn’t exactly come out the way she wanted to.

In a recent interview, the former Orange Is the New Black star opened up about her sexuality and how her news was not broken by her but rather a costar on the hit Netflix show. The actress appeared today on the Nancy Podcast, where she confessed that one of her costars outed her before she was comfortable enough to do it on her own terms.

Wiley did not name the colleague that released the information to the public but she did say that it deeply affected her, especially since she wasn’t ready to come out at that point in time.

“Someone from my cast actually, during the interview they were talking about out gay actors in the cast, and they mentioned my name and I saw it in print, and I cried. I cried a lot. And I like, tried to get it taken down. I had a journey. I wasn’t always super open-hearted, but um, yeah. More specifically, that’s something that somebody took from me. You should be able to come out on your own terms, so that was probably a little deeper.”

But even though she wasn’t ready, she did later say that she believes that everything happens for a reason and “whatever is supposed to happen will happen.”Additionally, the actress said that when she was first cast on OITNB, she wasn’t out in the beginning. But as the show evolved and she fell in love with her character, Poussey Washington, it also helped her to fall in love with herself as well.

The actress said that she wonders what would have become of her sexuality if she wasn’t cast on OITNB, considering many of the characters on the show are gay.

“I think that if I wasn’t portraying these characters, I wonder how my own journey with my own sexual orientation, how I would embrace that, how I would walk the world if I wasn’t able to embrace the characters that I have been.”

But like the actress said before, everything that is supposed to happen will happen. Not only did the Netflix show launch Samira into superstardom, later landing her roles in other hit shows like The Handmaid’s Tale, but the show also helped her to meet her now wife, Lauren Morelli.

Morelli was one of the writers on OITNB and she and Wiley dated for a while before tying the knot in Palm Springs, California in 2017.

Morelli was actually married but later split from her husband after she started writing for the show and realizing that she too was gay.