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Sara Hess on “Orange is the New Black” and writing Thirteen’s sex scenes on “House”

An openly gay writer on the staff of the very queer Orange is the New Black, Sara Hess penned the episodes “Blood Donut” and “Fool Me Once” for the first season, now on Netflix. Sara is also a co-executive producer on the Jenji Kohan-created show (based on a memoir by Piper Kerman) and she knows her shit. In fact, you’ve likely seen her work before. Sara wrote the episode of House in which Thirteen (Olivia Wilde) had sex with a woman, as well as several other episodes of the Fox series that featured the bisexual doctor. Sara took some time out of her schedule working on Season 2 of Orange to answer our questions, although she can’t tell us one darn thing about Piper and friends episode 14 and beyond. (We tried!)

AfterEllen.com: Congrats on the success of the show! Orange has so many queer elements to it-was that a draw to you as a writer? What appealed to you about the show in general before joining the writing staff?

Sara Hess: Thanks! We’re stoked/astonished/nervous/grateful about how it’s been received. I think more than anything else the thing that excites me about this show is the enormous diversity of women it features, both in front of and behind the camera. There are the women who make the show happen: from our overlords at Netflix and Lionsgate, to Jenji (obviously), the writers and producers, the AD staff and department heads, all preponderantly women. I came up on very male-oriented, male-dominated shows, and that was delightful and satisfying and I learned a ton, but this is amazing. It is honest-to-God groundbreaking. Beyond that, there’s never been a cast like this on television before: every size, shape, color, and age, women who look like women you know. Every variation on sexuality. Actors fresh out of school who’ve never had a real job before, Broadway hoofers who’ve been working the boards for 40 years. The combined breadth of life experience all in one place-it’s staggering. You guys, Uzo Aduba, who plays Crazy Eyes? She was like, NUMBER FIFTY on our call sheet. The bench is so deep. AE: Because you’re the only out woman on staff, do you think it gave you any kind of helpful knowledge when it came to writing about women who weren’t straight? SH: Actually, my joke is that I might be the least gay woman in the room. I mean straight girls these days, right? We do have an extremely gay-friendly staff. And maybe I made some small anecdotal contributions (like talking about my friends who refuse to date straight women, etc.) but in general I think the show’s approach is that everyone is the same at heart, that every relationship is both remarkable and unremarkable in very similar ways, and that ultimately gayness or straightness don’t particularly matter, and aren’t even that interesting in and of themselves. We’re just writing about people, in all their complexity and about how complicated it is to love other people. Lately-because there really is a “gay-for-the-stay” phenomenon in prison which is a real thing that Piper writes about in her book, and because of the tendency of writers (including me) to want to make everyone fall in love as a way of creating story-I’ve actually found myself defending the straight characters more. It turns out sometimes straight people really are just straight!

AE: Do you feel a sense of responsibility at all when writing queer characters, or to create them if they aren’t there to begin with (on any show, not just Orange)? SH: I guess it would depend on the show. In general I don’t feel a huge responsibility to create queer characters. I feel like we’re now at the point in Hollywood where that pretty much happens on its own. Writers out here are pretty overwhelmingly socially liberal and I think interested in representing gay people as equals-or at the very least, it’s now the “cool” thing to do. Actually sometimes I feel like it can go too far the other way. Like last year on Downton Abbey when the whole family found out Thomas was gay, and they were all basically awesome about it. Not that I wanted to see anything horrible happen to him as a result of bigotry, but you definitely saw the hand of the writer taking the opportunity to make a point to the audience (and one I truly appreciate, given where England was in its process toward marriage equality) but from a purely narrative standpoint I was like “Really?” That said, I do feel a responsibility to make sure that, in a sense, being gay is the least interesting thing about gay characters. The days are over (hopefully) when it was a big reveal like “WHAAAT?” Now we can just move on, and concentrate on making them real and making their relationships as nuanced and rounded as every other relationship on television.

AE: You wrote a very pivotal episode of House: “Lucky Thirteen.” Fox cut down the beginning scene from what it originally teased for air. What did you think of that and are there any tidbits you can share with us regarding the writing of that scene? SH: Well, part of the cut was just time, plain and simple. You always end up shooting more than you can use and then cutting to make it fit. As for the rest of it: any FOX objections to that teaser weren’t about the gay content, but the general explicitness of the scene (which is fair: it was a network show in primetime) and in particular a moment when Thirteen dropped to her knees in front of Spencer. They were actually pretty cool about the rest of it. We were bummed (“we” meaning my co-writer Liz Friedman, director Greg Yaitanes, and me) when we found out later that they had an existing rule against portraying-or indicating-oral sex (straight or gay), because if we’d known that we could have just choreographed the sequence a different way. The scene itself was originally Liz’s idea and it was basically just for the fun of it. We’d introduced Thirteen as bisexual, but the show was called House, and it was almost impossible to show any character who wasn’t actually House having an outside relationship. And almost everyone else in the cast was a dude. So she ended up dating Foreman for a while and when that was over we both really wanted to hook her up with a girl, if only briefly, just to show that side of her was real. And we knew that Olivia was definitely game, so Liz wrote this really hot make-out. It’s funny because later there was this backlash of people saying “of course the show only uses girl-on-girl as a kind of gimmick to get guys to watch” and in actuality it was gay women entertaining themselves. One thing I’m still sad about was that we wrote a later scene in which they actually bond in a real way, to show that their relationship wasn’t just sex/acting out, and that scene got cut (again, for time), which was/is just the reality of procedural television-anything that doesn’t directly advance the plot gets put on the chopping block in post. So you lose a lot of character nuance. The next year Liz had the script pages for that cut scene framed and gave them to me for my birthday. AE: What was your favorite Orange scene to write? A line you are most proud of? SH: Oh, that’s just not fair. The whole show is so much fun. I guess I would have to say Taystee getting her hair done in the salon and talking with her friends about being the black best friend in a white girl movie? I also personally love the Fischer/Caputo dynamic. Nick Sandow and Lauren Lapkus make me howl. And the fight between Cal and Neri in the trailer in Episode 12 just killed me. The actors are so brilliant. I was pretty proud of the “fat Bon Iver” stuff. Oh, and Taystee and Poussey in the library after Taystee comes back. Their chemistry/skill is beyond. AE: Because it was based on a book, Season 1 was loosely based on some preexisting characters and story lines. What can you tell us about Season 2? SH: Nothing. Seriously. The lid is on. Netflix would have me killed. (Hi, Netflix!) AE: How would you fare in the prison? Do you think you’d be hanging out with Nichols, Claudette or Crazy Eyes? SH: I think I’d do OK. I’d probably make friends with Black Cindy right away for protection. But mostly I’d be reading a thousand books alone in my bunk and staying the hell out of everyone’s way. And not pooping. I’m pretty sure I could do Piper’s whole sentence without pooping. Not to brag, but that’s a talent I have. Follow Sara on her personal Twitter (@sarahess) and also on the Orange Writers account (@orangewriters).

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