Orange Is the New Black Star Pablo Schreiber on the Perils of Live-Tweeting

Specs Age 37 Claim to fame Emmy Award nominee for his role as George "Pornstache" Mendez on Netflix's Orange Is the New Black; star of HBO's The Brink; appears in the Michael Bay film 13 Hours: The Secret Soldiers of Benghazi (in theaters Jan. 15) Base New York Twitter @schreiber_pablo Adweek: What's the first information you consume in the morning? Pablo Schreiber: The first information I consume in the morning is no information. I think it's really important to reset the brain in the morning. We get bombarded so much in our daily lives, so the first thing I do when I wake up is meditate. I like to have a nice, blank slate to start the day with. Do you use a meditation app? No, I don't. But strangely enough, that's how I was introduced to it. When I decided I wanted to start meditating, somebody gave me an app. It was really helpful, actually. But now I just use silence. Tell us about your social media habits. I'm on Twitter and Instagram. I basically have two Instagram lives. I have one for fans—it's basically all selfies and ridiculous things like that—and the other one is for friends and family, which has more nature and travel pictures and pictures of my kids. You said in an interview a couple of years ago that between playing "Pornstache" on Orange Is the New Black and a serial rapist on Law & Order: SVU, you felt like "one of the most hated men on Twitter." How's that going? [Laughs] It was all in fun. I think that those were both characters that people love to hate, you know? But I never felt that it got too personal, and—knock on wood—I haven't had too many hecklers or people bad-mouthing me on social media, which doesn't look like a lot of fun when I see other [actors] deal with it. You live-tweeted the season finale of The Brink. Is that something you do regularly? [Laughs] No! I did it once before, but it's not my favorite thing. In fact, I kind of despise it. It's really hard because you spend so much time looking at your phone and coming up with tweets that you can't actually take in anything that you're watching. The networks and the people that make the TV shows want you to do it because, I guess, it spikes viewership and makes people want to watch the show more. But even that is kind of depressing because if people are watching you tweet, they're not watching the show! I don't really understand the whole thing. What TV shows do you watch? I don't watch a lot of TV, unfortunately. I watch zero live TV except for sports. It's all DVR or On Demand. I like the HBO documentaries a lot. Obviously, The Jinx was awesome. It's a really interesting phenomenon, that whole investigative journalism trend with The Jinx and Serial. It's such a funny, voyeuristic thing. Everybody wants to be a private detective and figure out these crimes. What's the last thing you binge-watched? Breaking Bad. I had never seen a moment of it, but because it was such a part of everyone's consciousness and I heard so many people talking about it, I kind of felt like I had already watched it. As things were happening on the show, I was like, "Oh, I know about this." That's the problem with the ol' binge-watching, I guess. How do you wind down at night? Probably not in the best way possible. Recently, I've been browsing social media before bed, but I recognize the negative traps in that and I'm trying to get out of it. I think I'm going to take today as an opportunity to break that habit once and for all, so thank you for that. [Laughs] This story first appeared in the Aug. 31 issue of Adweek magazine. Click here to subscribe.

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Orange Is the New Black Star Pablo Schreiber on the Perils of Live-Tweeting

Cutting back on bad social media habits

Emma Bazilian

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Emma Bazilian