Star Danielle Brooks made the revelation to E! on the SAG Awards’ red carpet.
Orange Is the New Black is continuing to make bold moves going into its fifth season.
After a devastating cliffhanger at the end of its fourth season, the Netflix prison dramedy is focusing on a condensed time period for its upcoming fifth season, castmember Danielle Brooks revealed to E! on the SAG Awards red carpet on Sunday night. Brooks, when asked for some scoop about the upcoming season, said that the fifth season, of 13 episodes, would take place over three days.
“You better get ready,” Brooks added. “Get your popcorn, your tissues. I don’t know when it’s coming out because they don’t ever tell us but sometime in the summer.”
This detail breaks tradition, as Orange is the New Black has consistently kept the time span of each season vague so as to not specifically address how much time is left on characters’ sentences. The shortened time span is likely to address the intense fallout from last season, which featured the death of a major character and subsequent prison-wide riot.
The finale set the stage for an event that will likely continue to impact nearly every major character on the prison dramedy moving forward.
Last summer, Brooks, whose character Taystee was close to last season’s victim, told The Hollywood Reporter that the fifth season is “war.” “Taystee has nothing to lose, she’s lost everything that she cared so deeply about,” she said. “It’s time to fight. I think — I don’t know! — but I think that’s where we will see Taystee go.”
“You see Taystee in the beginning as someone who is just full of light and love,” Brooks added. “Then she lost her ‘mother’ Vee and had no explanation of how she died, while she’s also watching out for all of these women. Now she’s seen the death of her closest friend and has no justice for that.”
Going into Sunday night’s SAG Awards, OITNB is up for two awards: best ensemble in a comedy series and best actress in a comedy series (Uzo Aduba), both of which the Netflix series won last year.
