This article contains spoilers about the seventh—and final—season of Orange Is the New Black, now streaming on Netflix.

Adrienne C. Moore (Cindy Hayes, the inmate who converts to Judaism in season three) is in Atlanta for her 20-year high school reunion when she calls. “I’ve been to past reunions since the advent of Orange Is the New Black, and one thing I love about my friends is they know Adrienne,” she tells Glamour. They may occasionally blurt out that she’s on a show, she concedes, but “they’re Atlanta folks, and Atlanta folks are very down-to-earth kind of people.”

Like so many members of the sprawling Orange ensemble, Moore was a relative unknown when she was cast on the series. She was booking theater roles, commercials, and guest spots in New York, sure, but breakout opportunities for women, let alone women of color, were rare. Nobody knew who she was.

“This industry is hard,” says Laura Gómez (Blanca Flores, who thought she was being released from Litchfield only to be sent to an immigration facility). “You’re put in a box.” She auditioned for Orange while she was writing and directing a short film at New York University; by that point, she remembers, “I was considering maybe going to Spain to turn things around. I don’t know that I was about to quit acting, but I was thinking of ways to quit the torture that I was experiencing here.”

Selenis Leyva (Gloria Mendoza, who at times was head cook and the leader of the prison’s Spanish Harlem) shares a similar story. “I started acting at the age of 18,” she says. “I did a lot of guest roles, theater—sometimes it was free and sometimes it was as if it was free. You name it.” She was two decades into her career and on the verge of dropping out when she was tapped to play Gloria. “Literally, I said, ‘I’m done with acting,’” she recalls. “And then Orange popped up.”

“What the show did for so many of us, if not all of us, was open or reopen big doors,” Gómez says. “It put us on the map.”

When Orange premiered in 2013, there was some skepticism about whether it would sugarcoat prison. After all, the series is based on a memoir by Piper Kerman—a white middle-class Smith graduate—and stars Taylor Schilling as the fish-out-of-water inmate. But as creator Jenji Kohan explained from the outset, Piper was her “Trojan horse”: a stock blond that gave entrée into a more expansive world, one where women of all colors, shapes, sexual orientations, and ages coexisted. Orange wasn’t a Pollyanna prison story, and Kohan wasn’t making TV as usual.

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