Minutes before Beyoncé takes the stage at the Barclays Center in Brooklyn, three teenage girls spot an actress in the audience. "That's Laverne Cox!" "Who?" "She's from Orange Is the New Black!" With their iPhones at the ready for selfies, the trio of fans makes its way toward her to say hello. It's Dec. 22, 2013, the same week as the launch of Beyoncé's surprise album and five months since the Netflix series catapulted Cox into a whole new sphere of visibility. The black kid in Mobile, Ala., who became a fast runner in order to avoid bullies hurling the word "sissy" like a stone is now the woman strangers point at in public just before asking for autographs and pictures. A striking figure in her coral dress, Cox greets the girls with the kind of warmth I heard in her voice a few days earlier.

"Oh, so we're going in!" she chuckled when I asked her about leaving Alabama. It was 8 a.m. in Los Angeles where Cox was filming, but after months of waking up at 5 or 6 a.m. to be on set, an early morning phone interview about her life and career was, apparently, not a problem. "Well, OK! Let's go in."

People, even the kind of people we crown as breakout stars, don't come out of nowhere. So, how did Laverne Cox, actress, writer and transgender advocate, happen? "I just knew I had to get out of Alabama. And this isn't to disparage the South, but for me and my journey. I needed to be away to figure out who I was." That journey — from a preteen delivering speeches at Bethel African Episcopal Church in Mobile, to a regular on the '90s club scene in New York, to the first black trans woman on a reality television show, to a role on one of Netflix's hit shows — is not all that different from the twists and turns countless actors take on the road to stardom with one crucial exception: "The system isn't really set up to have these conversations about intersectionality and social justice when you're an actress. I always feel like someone is going to come along and say, 'OK, this has gone on for too long. We need to get rid of this girl.'" Laverne laughs at herself then, but it's not false humility I hear so much as a woman very aware of just how high the stakes are for her.

After years of bullying, culminating in a suicide attempt at age 11, Cox begged her mother to put her in a performing arts school. Her mother, a teacher, eventually agreed. That change, Cox says, saved her life. When I ask her about the bullying, she admits, "I've been talking about that so much lately." In an interview with I'm From Driftwood she elaborated: "Whenever something would happen [at school] and my mother would find out, she would yell at me and say 'Well, why didn't you fight back? [...] What are you doing to make them treat you like that?'" There isn't pain in her voice this morning so much as a clear interest in moving on. Instead of going into particulars, she simply tells me, "If you have something you love, that will get you through." For Cox, that love was about dance and theater.

She studied theater at Indiana University briefly before transferring to Marymount College in Manhattan. She has refined the art of laughing off questions about her age, so let's just say she landed in New York in the 1990s. "I had this idea of moving to New York and, like, within a year, I'd be a star. [laughs] That was my naïveté. I thought I was going to take the city by storm. And that did not happen." [more laughter] What did happen was an introduction to the city's club scene — no drinking, no drugs, she interjects — which allowed her to do her "gender thing."