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Laura Prepon: More ‘Orange Is The New Black’ Or ‘That 70s Show?’

By Dustin Kemp
Published on: 21:54 PST, Jun 17, 2016

Laura Prepon, best known in the current pop culture scene for playing Alex Vause on the Netflix original hit show Orange is the New Black, has done a pretty good job of selecting her TV roles over the years. Prepon’s successful characters have ranged from independent and laid back as Donna on That 70s Show to shady as Alex on the aforementioned OITNB, to extremely pretentious as Karen on How I Met Your Mother. Architectural Digest recently sat down with Prepon to find out which of her many varying TV personas she is actually the most similar to.

The interviewer decided to start the session off easy by asking Prepon something about her screen career, so he asked her what was TV set, out of the many Laura has worked on, she appreciated the most.

“I have to go with That ’70s Show‘s basement set,” Prepon replied quickly.

“I have such nostalgia for all the time I spent there. Whenever I see a picture of the grungy couch and the little lawn chair and the wagon-wheel table, it brings back the memories.”

So it seems Laura Prepon is actually a bit more similar to the free-wheeling, go-with-the-flow Donna than anyone else Prepon has played.

When asked her favorite type of music, Prepon replied that she really enjoys “old-school country,” citing Waylon Jennings and Merle Haggard as some of her favorite artists. Donna seems like more of a rock n’ roll chick herself, but something folksy like old-timey country tunes definitely suggests a laid-back persona.

Prepon goes on to say how she likes to cook herself dinner and eat it in her kitchen with her boots kicked up on her counter.

“All my friends know that, so they never hang at the side of the counter, because they know I have to hang my leg there,” Prepon laughs.

Yep, that sounds like Laura Prepon’s messy and empowered Donna we grew to love during That 70s Show‘s 1998 to 2006 run.

Wait a second, though. When asked what one could find on her bedside table, Laura Prepon’s response went in a very different direction.

“A silver reading lamp,” Prepon said, “which I bought because my crystal chandeliers weren’t giving me enough reading light—lip balm, and a carafe of water.”

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Crystal chandeliers? A carafe of water? That certainly doesn’t seem very Donna-ish. In fact, it would not be surprising if Donna did not even know what the word “carafe” means (it is “an open-topped glass flask typically used for serving wine or water”).

In response to another question about what she kept her fridge stocked with, Prepon said she always kept frozen bone broth “because the body assimilates its healing micronutrients.”

Yeah, that’s definitely not Donna speaking. At this point, it’s seeming more and more that Prepon mirrors her unbearably pretentious “Karen” character from How I Met Your Mother, an idea that is only reinforced when Laura reveals that her favorite piece of furniture she bought for her home is a tie between “a coffee table made from an old Moroccan door with glass inlay” and an elk-antler chandelier.

Maybe it’s a bit unfair to say Laura Prepon is similar to Karen, as Karen is snobby to the point where she annoys people around her. But Prepon is quite a bit more refined and glamorous (some might even say stuck-up) than her That 70s Show persona.

She seems to fall somewhere in the middle, like her Orange is the New Black character. Expensive tastes and a sense for high fashion, but a more down-to earth mindset that keeps life moving forward.

You can check out Laura Prepon’s character, Alex Vause, in the fourth season of Orange is the New Black, which only yesterday was released on Netflix in its entirety.

[Photo by Dimitrios Kambouris/Getty Images]

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