Even though Taylor Schilling plays a prisoner on Netflix's hit show, Orange Is the New Black, she is anything but locked up in real life. The actress opens up to Net-a-Porter's The EDIT about her unconventional childhood and how it led her to become the "rogue" person she is today.
Splitting time between her divorced parents, Schilling realized early on that her childhood was anything but normal. Her parents didn't get along, which ultimately meant that she had to adapt to her surroundings given the circumstances.
"I think I was just born rogue," she tells the magazine. "My parents did not have a good relationship. There was no sense of, 'This is where you belong. This is how you have a friend over for a tea party. This is how you go to a dance.' It was chaotic. I thought, well, I might as well go off-map."
Maybe it was going "off-map" that led her to Jenji Kohan's hit series, as she decided to take the road less traveled and drop out of New York University's Tisch School of the Arts after he second year to pursue her dream head on. "I appreciate what I learned there. [It made me] unafraid of the stage," she explains.
"I'm not afraid of Chekhov or Shakespeare. But I thought, 'How much more theory can we talk about?' I had to spread my wings."
She soon landed a role in a short-lived drama, Mercy, which served as a real wake-up call about life in Hollywood and what to expect about a career in acting. Needless to say, she realized that she was up against a lot of competition.
"There are people in the business who have been working since they were children, and they're pros by 24. But that wasn't me," she admits. "It was very hard. I felt a lot of responsibility. I felt like I wasn't able to bring it."
But after several roles that she describes as, "This is not me," Schilling landed the role of Piper Chapman, a woman who was expected to be one way but turned out to be quite another.
"There are expectations people have of blond-haired, blue-eyed girls, and that's to be good. That's how Piper grew up. She was meant to follow the rules: marry a man, have a baby and a business that her mother approves of," she says. "[But] the center could not hold. And now she's scrambling to put the pieces back together to find out who she is, and it doesn't fit in the mold."
As someone who has been going against the grain from the get go, Schilling feels she could relate because, as she says, she has never quite fit in, which has its pros and cons.
"It can feel painful to be on the outside looking in, and it can be incredibly liberating to say, 'Alright, I've got nothing to lose,'" she says.