Did you know about Erica Gauthier’s side of the story before joining the show?

No, not at all. I had no idea how Pam & Tommy’s sex tape got out into the world. I vaguely thought they had been involved with it or released it because I was a little bit too young when that happened to process it in real time. Erica is like a bay leaf in the stew of this whole story. She really holds it down, as a sex worker by choice, who’s able to delineate between porn and exploitation. She can really clearly articulate that. It’s a really smart element to add into this story. Erica differentiates from what is appropriate and empowered, and what’s not. What they did was criminal, and a deep betrayal.

r most of the 2010s, Taylor Schilling led the cast of one of the queerest shows on TV. In Orange is the New Black, the unflinching comedy-drama set in a women’s prison, she played Piper Chapman, a bougie New Yorker who ends up behind bars. Yanked away from her life in the West Village selling artisanal bath products, Piper spends incarceration using sanitary towels as flip-flops and hooking up with her on-off girlfriend in the prison chapel. As The New Yorker noted at the time: “There are more lesbians here – butch and femme and of every ethnicity – than in any other series on television.” But Schilling’s personal life off screen? Well, she didn’t see how that was anyone’s business.

“I was dating men, women, all sorts of people at that time,” the 37-year-old tells me over video call from Los Angeles. “But I never was in a long-term, happy relationship, so it never crossed my mind to make it a part of my public life. I was just like, ‘Are we going to go on another date?’” She covers her face with her hands. “It’s so embarrassing! I feel uncomfortable sharing myself for the sake of it.” On Pride weekend last year, when Schilling posted an Instagram story about her girlfriend, the artist Emily Ritz, headlines exclaimed that she had “come out”. “It’s very confusing to me when people are like, ‘When you came out…’ because since I was 14, everyone’s known who I am. I’ve always been exactly who I’ve been.”