Prison break-out
One of the few dudes on ‘Orange Is the New Black,’ Matt McGorry has a chiseled chest under his uniform — and a wicked sense of humor
FANS of “Orange Is the New Black” love to throw themselves at the show’s piece of man-meat, Matt McGorry — usually on Twitter.
“My mom actually reads all that — she just finds it cute,” McGorry tells The Post. “She’ll be like, ‘Guess what Jeffrey Wilkinson from Des Moines, Iowa, said?”
As Bennett, the only nice male prison guard on the hit Netflix series, which is streaming its second season now, McGorry gets quite a bit of attention — both from his female costars on set and from fans watching the show. Two weeks after the first season began streaming last summer, viewers dug up photos from his ripped past, which included competing in bodybuilding and powerlifting competitions.
That attention wasn’t necessarily welcome for the actor, who says he was chubby growing up in Chelsea, which he still calls home.
“Coming from a background where I never felt super comfortable with my body, I still have issues with it,” says the 28-year-old.
At 14, he won a science fair, and his parents rewarded him with a trainer, who got him down to the 5.5 percent body fat seen in his bodybuilding photos. He threw the competitions out the window when he was cast in “OITNB.”
“I’m glad I did it because I wanted to know what it took to look that way so that I can now actively make the decision that I never want to do that again,” he says of his bodybuilding years, “with [the] exception of if they need a new Wolverine in a few years.”
Prior to “OITNB,” he popped up on shows such as “Gossip Girl” as a Cartier salesman. But now, he seems to have broken out of doing bit television parts: He’s just filmed the leading man role in an indie drama, “How He Fell in Love,” and is set to star this fall on the ABC legal drama “How to Get Away With Murder.”
Still, as McGorry comes to terms with sex symbol status and fame, he knows to stay grounded.
“I have to sometimes limit myself,” he says. “If I post a photo to Instagram, I don’t have to keep checking it every 10 minutes.”