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‘Orange Is the New Black’ star responds to fans who think he’s a bad dad

'TV is not real life.'

Photo of Audra Schroeder 

Audra Schroeder

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Posted on Jun 21, 2015   Updated on May 28, 2021, 12:53 pm CDT

This article contains spoilers for Orange Is the New Black. 

Season 3 of Orange Is the New Black finds correctional officer John Bennett (Matt McGorry) trying to sketch out his future and that of his baby with inmate Dayanara. Bennett just wants to do the right thing, but he faces several obstacles. 

Some fans criticized Bennett’s behavior this season, namely the fact that he left the prison without saying anything to the pregnant Daya, right after proposing to her. Fans are apparently unaware that he’s playing a fictional character, and this photo only fanned the fictional flames. 

On Sunday, he posted a photo to Instagram in an attempt to make the line between fiction and reality a little clearer. 

Happy Fathers Day to all the real fathers out there! I am an actor and I play the fictional character John Bennett on the fictional television show entitled Orange Is The New Black. Here I am with actresses Dascha Polanco and Elizabeth Rodriguez who play make-believe mother-daughter characters named Dayanara and Aleida Diaz on the made up television program with me. They are not mother and Daugther in real life even though they and we play pretend characters that are sometimes even the opposite of who we are as real live people while not reflecting our real lives because it is not real. Moments before this photograph was taken I was even saying words that were written by another person, all the while pretending that my name was John Bennett and that his thoughts and actions were a result of my own brain! Weirdly, the words coming out of my mouth and the things I did in the story were not created by me at all! To make matters even more confusing, I am even dressed in fictional character John Bennett’s costume (a costume is like fictional clothes) in this photograph that was taken on the television set and afterwards I went home to my apartment in New York City where I don’t have a child because I’m not a father and have never worked in a prison and TV is not real life. #oitnb

A photo posted by Matt McGorry (@mattmcgorry) on

“To make matters even more confusing,” he wrote, “I am even dressed in fictional character John Bennett’s costume (a costume is like fictional clothes) in this photograph that was taken on the television set and afterwards I went home to my apartment in New York City where I don’t have a child because I’m not a father and have never worked in a prison and TV is not real life.”

Judging from some of the comments on that post, it seems a few people still don’t get it, but hey, he tried, much like his fictional character, John Bennett. 

And let us never forget the real highlight of season 3: 

H/T Entertainment Weekly | Photo via Disney | ABC Television Group/Flickr (CC BY ND 2.0)

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*First Published: Jun 21, 2015, 5:26 pm CDT

Audra Schroeder

Audra Schroeder is the Daily Dot’s senior entertainment writer, and she focuses on streaming, comedy, and music. Her work has previously appeared in the Austin Chronicle, the Dallas Observer, NPR, ESPN, Bitch, and the Village Voice. She is based in Austin, Texas.

Audra Schroeder