It’s rare to find the kind of job where you are required to show up looking like hell.
On “Orange Is the New Black,” exhausted is the new camera-ready.
“How ever hard you lived the day or night before, the better,” says Lorraine Toussaint, who joins the rambunctious cast this season as Vee, a woman who ran a drug den and used children, such as Taystee (Danielle Brooks) to do her dirty work. With her proud head crowned by a lion’s mane of frizzy hair, she drips malicious intent. “My hair did not see a comb for six months.
“To have a job that is a complete non-vanity job is one of the most freeing aspects of the show,” says Toussaint, 54. “It ain’t about wearing Spanks.”
Toussaint is best known for playing roles on the other side of the law. She has played an attorney (the Lifetime series “Any Day Now”), a police captain (“Saving Grace”) and a physician (“Law & Order: SVU”). “People see me as this middle-class professional, a well-spoken, well deported kind of woman. I look great in a suit, and I do not mean a jumpsuit,” she says. “I’ve gone from Armani suits to wrinkled, out-of-the-dryer orange jumpsuits.”
Vee is more than a walk on the wild side for Toussaint, and she hopes the audience that has watched her playing all those articulate, well-dressed ladies from TV procedurals will “have fun” with the character. “But it cost me to play her because she lives in such a dark part of the psyche. Vee is a psychotic. Vee is a predator.”
She cultivates a power base in prison by ingratiating herself with the younger African-American convicts. Her relationship with another powerful inmate — Red, the deposed kitchen queen played with such relish by Kate Mulgrew — is a powder keg.
“They’re two matriarchs,” Toussaint says. “It’s our second time around. We’ve been together before. Intimately.”
Jennifer Euston, casting director for the series, says Toussaint solved two problems for the show. “The most important thing I was looking for when casting Vee was a ruthlessness combined with an insidious charm. I also needed an actress capable of holding her own with the formidable Kate Mulgrew, which is not an easy task.”
Toussaint was born in Trinidad and moved to Brooklyn when she was 10. She went to Juilliard when Kevin Spacey, Andre Braugher and Kelly McGillis were students. She commuted to the school at Lincoln Center from an apartment on Eastern Parkway in Crown Heights, long before the wand of gentrification was waved over that neighborhood. Coming home from school at night was a hairy scene.
“I’d call my mother from that subway station and say I was walking home. Half a block. And she would look out the window for me. It was not safe.”
The last time Toussaint went back to the old neighborhood, she was shocked. “It’s like another city I don’t even recognize,” she says. “It’s so gentrified.”
After production ended on “Orange,” Toussaint went home to LA, combed her hair and the phone rang. It was a call to play another plum part: real-life civil rights activist Amelia Boynton in the forthcoming film “Selma,” which tells the story of the 1965 Selma-to-Montgomery march to enforce the Voting Rights Act. Toussaint has been filming in Atlanta.
“Amelia Boynton invited Martin Luther King to come to Selma and set it up as the battle front that it turned out to be for voting rights,” Toussaint says. “Her face was on the cover of Life magazine. The historical face of the woman being dragged across the Edmund Pettus Bridge. It was the moment the world got to see what was happening in Alabama.”
So things are on the upswing, then?
“Thank God,” Toussaint says. “I’m really looking forward to the next chapter of this career. I signed on a long time ago in this career and you ride the wave. There’s so much work I want to do that I haven’t done yet.”