Actress Samira Wiley engaged
Actress Samira Wiley is engaged to writer Lauren Morelli.
The Orange is the New Black star and Lauren, who is part of the show's creative team, have been dating since 2014 and on Tuesday (04Oct16) Samira announced the couple is set to wed.
Showing off a picture of her engagement ring on Instagram, Samira
captioned the photograph, "yes."
Lauren was previously married to Steve Basilone, but the couple
divorced in 2014 after two years of marriage, after she went public
with the fact she was gay and had fallen for Samira.
"I realized I was gay in fall 2012, one of my first days on the set
(of Orange is the New Black)," she wrote in an essay for
Identities.Mic in May, 2014. "While Writing for Orange Is the New
Black, I Realized I Am Gay. Five months after my wedding, I flew to
New York to start production on my first episode of Orange, and
from that moment on my life fell into a parallel rhythm with (lead
character) Piper's story in a way that went from interesting to
terrifying in a matter of months."
She went on to reveal it took an intimate scene between lesbian
characters Alex Vause (Laura Prepon) and Piper Chapman (Taylor
Schilling) for Morelli to really come to terms with her
sexuality.
She added, "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. I was sure it was
bleeding into my writing. How could it not? I was married to a man,
but I wasn't straight."