Orange Is the New Black’s New Warden on Prison Bonding and Life After Litchfield (original) (raw)

The following story contains spoilers for Orange Is the New Black season seven.

When Susan Heyward was cast in Orange Is the New Black as corrections officer Tamika Ward, she had no idea her character would become Litchfield’s well-meaning warden in the show’s final season. At the time, Heyward was busy preparing to play Rose Granger-Weasley in _Harry Potter and the Cursed Child_’s 2018 Broadway premiere. “I was like, Oh, man, I guess they’ll only have me on for a few episodes and then I start rehearsals—Bye!” she said in a recent interview. But the producers worked around the Carnegie Mellon drama school graduate’s schedule so that she could have more screen time as Ward, a guard who is Taystee’s (Danielle Brooks) old high school buddy and burger-joint coworker.

It was a happy coincidence that Heyward and Brooks knew each other as well; both attended the same South Carolina arts high school, although not at the same time. “When [Danielle] saw my name on the call sheet, she immediately texted me and was like, ‘Girl, are we gonna get to play together? Yes!’” Heyward said. “I don’t know what kind of magic crystal ball the writers had, but we actually did have that foundational relationship to play with.”

Their characters’ friendship—the crux of a season-seven plot in which a suicidal Taystee is coaxed back to life by Tamika after becoming her assistant—underpins Heyward’s performance as the naive 26-year-old, a character who sees herself in Taystee.

“I think she’s fighting for herself—who she could’ve been—and for all of the other people she’s known who have gotten caught up in jail,” said Heyward. It’s pure bravado that allows Tamika to stand up to the prison’s male guards, who are intent on manipulating her and taking her down. “I end up playing characters with a little bit of chutzpah, going into situations before they’ve got the full scope of the situation,” she added, laughing. “I think that might be a little something the writers [saw] in me that comes out.”

Unaware how aligned she’s become with the system, Tamika takes correction-management night classes after discovering that the prison’s white officers make more money than she does—and being told that she has to step it up if she wants to eliminate the pay gap. “I think Tamika does what a lot of people do—certainly a lot of black women,” said Heyward, a Georgia-born pastor’s daughter. “You do the extra work that people tell you you have to do in order to make a difference where you are. I know I was certainly raised with the idea that I had to work twice as hard to get half as much.”

Yet when Tamika leaps over all of the other guards to land the warden job (“you are so well-spoken without being strident,” prison administrator Linda Ferguson (Beth Dover) tells her during an interview, “and I just love the way your hair looks”), she’s surprised to discover she’s a “diversity” hire. Having experienced tokenism herself, Heyward understands the difficulty in recognizing this unpleasant truth. “I’m a little bit like Tamika—I’m rarely able to see it at the beginning,” she said. “I find myself inside of it, and then realize it. And then sometimes I’m driven crazy because I’m not quite sure.”

In Tamika’s case, the reasons that underpin her hiring are affirmed by former warden Natalie “Fig” Figueroa (Alysia Reiner), who, along with her now-boyfriend—and Tamika’s night-class teacher—Joe Caputo (Nick Sandow), become Tamika’s mentors. Fig advises Tamika to make the most of her situation, and “get a better blazer.” She does, closing the prison’s solitary confinement unit, starting farm-therapy and GED programs for inmates, and upgrading her wardrobe—perhaps, Heyward imagined, thanks to family who worked in retail.

Heyward is also on the rise, though she’s been working at her craft longer than Tamika. The 36-year-old actress was once told by a director she had “ingénue face”—but she’s worked hard to avoid those sorts of roles. (She’s pleased, for instance, if you don’t recognize her from Martin Scorsese’s short-lived HBO series Vinyl.) “I trained as a character actress. Someone who, if given a chance, transforms into someone else totally,” she says. That’s meant playing roles as diverse as a homicide detective in the Sony PlayStation Series Powers and Herald, a military officer in _Othello_—a part Heyward transformed into “this clown-like character who was half Napoleon, and half Steve Urkel from _Family Matters._”

Three members of the OITNB family—Natasha Lyonne, Laura Prepon, and Sandow—directed Heyward this season. Her frequent scene partner Sandow was particularly“fantastic” during two episodes in which she had big scenes with Dover, she said. “He understands what actors need. How to give us freedom and guidance at the same time.” In the most important of those scenes, Heyward strove to strike a balance between Tamika’s arrogance and humility when she gets “smacked down” by an irate Linda after her TV interview. “I didn’t want her to cower…to go all the way back down to zero with no authority.”

A poignant moment follows, in which Tamika stifles back tears as Taystee comforts her. “You’re the first warden to even try to make this place better,” she tells her old friend, before their conversation turns comic: The two women try to puzzle out who Michael Bolton and Ricky Jay are—a pair of unknown-to-them celebrities Linda had mentioned during her rant.

Can we assume Heyward and Brooks were more knowledgeable than their characters? “You can assume it,” Heyward said, laughing. “But you wouldn’t be right. I knew Michael Bolton.”

Though that exchange was scripted, the two acting-school alumni did get to improvise an intimate moment in the show’s final episode, when Tamika goes to Taystee’s cell after Doggett’s (Taryn Manning) body is discovered. She “crosses [a] boundary, and sits down—_in a suit_—next to her, and talks to her just as a friend instead of only as a warden,” Heyward said. “That was so small, and there were [only] so many words. [But] sometimes in order to get into that really delicate place, you go off script a little bit.”

So, what’s next for Heyward? “I would love to be on another series, especially [one where the] storytelling shifts and changes, like _When They See Us,_” she said. Tamika, meanwhile, will probably be fine even after being fired from Litchfield; Heyward said she thinks that after the show ends, her character will seek out like-minded people “who are doing the work that she tried to do.” Perhaps that means getting a job at the Poussey Washington Fund.