Which ‘Orange Is The New Black’ Season 4 Stars Knew About That Emotional Death First

Viewers weren’t the only ones feeling emotional about that major death in “Orange Is the New Black” Season 4. (Consider this your spoiler alert! Stop reading now if you haven’t finished binge-watching.) Samira Wiley revealed that she and her co-stars on the Netflix comedy shared a few tears over her character Poussey’s death.

“I told [Danielle Brooks] and Uzo [Aduba] at the same time before everyone, yes,” Wiley told E! Online. “We definitely had a bottle of wine there. We needed that to get through it.”

Brooks apparently reacted very much like her character Taystee. “When I first told her about it, she was shocked and we cried together first before we did the scene, we cried together afterwards and we cried through it,” Wiley explained. “I haven’t really experienced anything like the chemistry Danielle and I have on screen and the journey we’ve been able to take together. It’s something really, really special.”

Wiley revealed to the Hollywood Reporter that she told her friends shortly before the episode 12 script was delivered. She had decided that she didn’t want her friends to read about Poussey’s death first.

“It was before the script came out, maybe a week or two before that, and I met Danielle and Uzo at one of their houses and I remember I got there and I was like, ‘Do you guys have a bottle of wine?’ And they said no and I said, ‘OK, well I’m going to need a bottle of wine,’ ” the actress recalled. “Danielle and I went out and got a bottle of wine and came back and we just sat there and we cried together and we drank together and we smiled together, we reminisced. I’m so grateful that I was able to have that night with them.”

Wiley had to keep the news to herself for a long while, though. The actress discovered the news as the cast and crew started work on “Orange Is the New Black” Season 4, but the death is at the end of the season. Aside from telling Brooks and Aduba, Wiley kept Poussey’s death quiet until the script came out.

“So I basically knew the whole season, which was great for me to be able to have a whole season of this news to myself, to be able to process it, to be able to sit back and reflect and just have some knowledge that this would have some finality for me,” the actress explained to Vulture. “The hardest thing was probably keeping it a secret from everybody else. Nobody else in the cast knew until the script came out. As of now, I have known for over a year.”

Though the 29-year-old won’t be returning to the Netflix show for Season 5, she’ll still be working with her “OITNB” family. Former writer Stephen Falk has cast Wiley in FXX’s “You’re the Worst,” and she is set to reunite with Kimiko Glenn, who played Poussey’s girlfriend Soso, on a film called “Nerve.”