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Laverne Cox, 52, landed her first big acting role at the age of 40, playing Sophia Burset, a trans woman sent to prison for credit card fraud, in the acclaimed TV series Orange is the New

Black. Accolades followed, but before she could accept her success, she had to work through her views on age first.

“The Orange is the New Black audition happened and my real age was coming out and being printed in articles, and I freaked out. I had internalized so much ageism,” she says. “I started

Today she’s proud of her age, and her career. Since Orange, she won an Emmy in 2015 for her role executive-producing the 2014 documentary Laverne Cox Presents: The T Word, costarred in the

2022 TV miniseries Inventing Anna, the 2024 Netflix science fiction film Uglies, as well as numerous TV shows. Her newest project is Clean Slate, one of the late Norman Lear’s last shows,

premiering Feb. 6 on Prime Video. Here, Cox tells AARP how her new show reflects her personal experiences, her advice for her younger self, and how she’s staying fit.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

In Clean Slate, you portray a trans woman, Desiree. Do any of her experiences reflect your own journey?

We used a lot of my life in the show. I’ll let you guess what’s real and what’s not. I mean, some of the things that happened were funny and then we amped them up to be even funnier. The

whole premise of the show is that Desiree left home when she was 17 and then 23 years later, she sees how she’s made some bad dating decisions and chosen unavailable people. Her life isn’t

quite where it needs to be, and so she goes back home to Alabama to address some unresolved issues that can only happen with her dad (played by George Wallace, 72) in terms of healing. And

of course, hilarity ensues because it's a comedy and it’s Norman Lear.