Samira Wiley Says 'OITNB' Co-Star Outed Her Sexuality Without Permission

Orange Is the New Black star Samria Wiley may be happily married, but she was reduced to tears [...]

Orange Is the New Black star Samria Wiley may be happily married, but she was reduced to tears after her co-star accidentally outed her.

Wiley, who portrayed Poussey in the Netflix original series and now portrays Moira in Hulu's The Handmaid's Tale, opened up about the incident in an interview on the Nancy podcast on Tuesday, revealing that she "wasn't out at all" when incident occurred.

"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," Wiley said, though she declined to mention which of her OITNB castmates let the news slip.

"I cried a lot. And I like, tried to get it taken down," she said. "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."

Wiley also admitted that her portrayal of LGBT characters – both Poussey and Moira are LGBT characters – has helped her feel more comfortable with her sexuality.

"I wasn't out in the beginning and I think falling in love with Poussey, which is really a thing that happened to me, helped me fall in love with myself as well," she said. "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."

In March of 2017, Wiley tied the knot with Orange Is the New Black writer Lauren Morelli, who, in an open essay published on Identities.Mic at the time, detailed how she realized she was gay while writing for the series.

"I realized I was gay in fall 2012, one of my first days on the set," Morelli wrote. "Accordingly, I was nervous about the first love scene I'd written for Alex and Piper. I loved writing it, loved watching a tenderness emerge in their relationship where passion always seemed to be the ruling principle, but by that time, I was so deep in my own self-doubt that I constantly felt like a fraud."

Wiley and Morelli had initially met on the set of the Netflix series and became engaged in 2016.

The first six seasons of Orange Is the New Black are available for streaming on Netflix. Seasons one and two of The Handmaid's Tale are available for streaming on Hulu.

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