Mackenzie Phillips, who works as a counselor here at Breathe, took on a dramatic guest role in season 6 of Orange Is the New Black playing Barb, a drug-addicted cellblock boss serving a life sentence. Vanity Fair spoke with Phillips about the role at the time, and about how her own decades of experience with substance use and recovery shaped how she approached the character.
Phillips has been open for years about her own history with addiction, including multiple attempts at treatment before she found lasting recovery. In the Vanity Fair interview, she described drawing on that history to play a character whose struggles she understood far more intimately than most actors could, while being careful to note the difference: the character she played never found the recovery Phillips herself now has, and now spends her career helping others find.
You can read the full interview, “How Orange Is the New Black Got Mackenzie Phillips to Tap into Her Past,” by Lisa Liebman, at Vanity Fair.
