On Monday, actor Laura Gómez of Netflix's "Orange Is the New Black" told Cheddar "reality sometimes is too harsh to deal with, so fiction does the job."
Her comments follow the release of the hit show's seventh, and final, season on Friday, which sees the character she plays, Blanca Flores, navigate an Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention center.
"I think we have been doing this from the get-go, which is bringing these important topics to the table. But now — right now — we're living through this reality, which is [the] immigration crisis that we're going through," said Gómez. "We're going through an administration that is really demonizing immigrants."
Her character's story comes amid a larger effort by the show to incorporate immigration into its criminal justice and incarceration-oriented plotlines.
"I feel like we are here — I am here, as an immigrant myself — saying there's a rhetoric around this that is not right and is a little bit of divide-and-conquer. I think the show is humanizing these stories, and making us look directly into those issues, and making us confront it," she explained.
Last week, the show's staff announced the creation of the Poussey Washington Fund, a fund that will support several non-profits working on immigrant justice and criminal justice advocacy, including the Immigrant Defenders Law Center and Freedom for Immigrants.
Poussey Washington is the name of a beloved character on the show played by Samira Wiley who, at the end of the show's fourth season, is killed by a corrections officer.
"To use this fictional character to help real issues — and people are really living through those circumstances — is part of the power of the arts," said Gómez.
On Monday, Carolina Paiz, a writer and executive producer on the show, published an essay for Buzzfeed that described a trip to a detention center that the show's writing staff took. She explained why OITNB's focus has expanded to include immigration.
"What we saw there that day inspired an important part of our final season. But it also changed us. While we came in with wildly differing opinions on immigration, we all left stunned by what we'd witnessed, agreeing that it didn't stand for our American values," she wrote.
Summer is heating up and more people are starting to travel, but some are opting to skip the security lines at the airports and travel by train. As part of our Need2Know Vacation series, cheddar's Ashley Mastronardi reports from a train en route to Virginia.
The iconic 7-Eleven Slurpee cup just got a makeover. The company rolled out the new cups on Monday as part of its "Anything Flows" campaign, and they feature a colorful design on the front with a big "S" resembling the swirly top of the icy drink.
From the end of the Hollywood Foreign Press Association to the beginning of a new zombie apocalypse, here's what's going on in entertainment.
One person was killed and multiple people were sent to local hospitals after a boat capsized Monday during a tour of an underground cavern system built to carry water from the Erie Canal beneath the western New York city of Lockport, officials said.
There was plenty of uncertainty in the run-up to this year’s Tony Awards, which at one point seemed unlikely to happen at all because of the ongoing Hollywood writer’s strike.
Classical music concerts have been popular since the age of Beethoven, Bach, and Mozart, but you've probably never thought about attending one in a cemetery. Our own Chloe Aiello spoke with Andrew Ousley, founder of Death of Classical, to learn more about a concert series held in the catacombs of the Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn.
You may not know her name, but you've probably seen her face. Madhulika Sharma has graced Vogue India and ELLE Magazine and modeled for popular brands such as Reformation and Skims. Cheddar's own Hena Doba spoke with Sharma to discuss her globe-spanning modeling career, her education in fashion history, and working alongside Kim Kardashian.
The intimate, funny-sad musical “Kimberly Akimbo” nudged aside more splashier rivals on Sunday to win the best new musical crown at the Tony Awards on a night when Broadway flexed its muscle in the face of Hollywood writers’ strike and fully embraced trans-rights with history-making winners.
The ChatGPT chatbot, personified by different avatars on a huge screen above the altar, led the more than 300 people through 40 minutes of prayer, music, sermons and blessings.
New York's Assembly and Senate passed a bill to create a commission that would consider reparations for slavery.
