The Hot List: Alex Vause

Fictional or flesh and blood, waiting in the pages of a book or splashed across your screens, some humans send your personal mercury reaching just that little bit closer to fetch-me-the-smelling-salts. The Hot List is a celebration of the totally unattainable, the ones who just wouldn't ever work out even if you could swing a cosy candlelit meeting. Up first is Alex Vause, a bad girl who proves that you can have killer taste in specs but still be totally blind when it comes to love. 

Vause-some

For the still uninitiated, Alex (played by Laura Prepon) is the heroin-dealing love/hate interest of lead inmate Piper in Netflix series Orange is the New Black. If you haven’t seen it, cancel your life plans for the next 26 hours, and go and binge. It’s fine, the rest of us will wait…

It’s great, right? To recap, Alex’s dodgy dealings land her and former girlfriend Piper in Litchfield Prison, where our anti-heroine is sent to clean up her act and the inmates’ underwear in the laundry rooms. Sadly her smart humour is grossly underappreciated among her ‘colleagues’, a bunch of homophobic evangelists who display an unusual amount of imagination with the nickname Lurch.

Alex is far from a Frankenstein, even if that super glossy hair could give Elsa Lanchester’s Bride a run for her money in the fabulousness stakes. (Seriously, is there a black market in conditioner in that prison?) Pasty people everywhere are now looking at shapeless beige PJs as a very real fashion option, thanks to that no-shits-given attitude with which Vause pulls them off. Even more importantly, she may have single-handedly proven to every vision-impaired girl watching that while Hollywood would have us all believe glasses should be snapped, chucked and replaced with contacts before you can say bi-focals, it’s absolutely possible to look smokin’ in specs. Already broken your glasses in a fit of rage? Make like Vause and accessorise with tape. Move aside, Potter, the DIY fixer-upper has never looked so good.

However, behind that wry sense of humour and permanently raised eyebrow, you know that Alex does care what people think. The character hits viewers a bit like Marmite’s supposed to. Some would describe her as a self-centred, heroin-dealing, manipulative narcissist – but you get the feeling that she would be one of them. After being abandoned by her father and living through the standard high school bullying everyone without the right brand of trainers gets, Alex has known all along that she’s far from perfect. That often brutal honesty reveals not just a keen observation of other people’s issues, but a self-awareness, even if she’s powerless to change. Her ambition to keep going in the heroin trade comes from her sense that she has to work extra hard to get people to love and respect her.

She might be tougher now, but we still get flashes of this insecurity. Perhaps it’s remembering this need to fit in that explains why she’s so taken with Piper. Suddenly, a rich, blonde, spoilt brat is drawn in by the mad lifestyle and awkward differentness that once marked her out for isolation. It makes it all the more powerful when she turns Piper down. Sorry, Pipes. Be less annoying.  

Not everyone gets Alex’s blend of devil-may-care charm, sardonic humour, blunt and swift honesty, and heart melting vulnerability. But you get the sense that she’ll probably get over it.

Specs appeal..