• Faith: Agnostic
• Career: Actress
• Birthday:  May 29, 1984

Laverne Cox is an actress and LGBT advocate. She rose to fame with her role as Sophia Burset on the Netflix series “Orange is the New Black,” becoming the first transgender person to be nominated for a Primetime Emmy in an acting category and the first to be nominated for an Emmy since composer Angela Morley in 1990. In 2015, Cox won a Daytime Emmy Award in Outstanding Special Class Special as executive producer for “Laverne Cox Presents: The T Word,” making her the first trans woman to win the award.

In 2017, she became the first transgender person to play a transgender series regular on U.S. broadcast TV as Cameron Wirth on “Doubt.” Cox appeared as a contestant on the first season of VH1’s reality show “I Want to Work for Diddy” and co-produced and co-hosted the VH1 makeover series “TRANSform Me.” In April 2014, she was honored by GLAAD with its Stephen F. Kolzak Award for her work as an advocate for the transgender community. In June of that same year, she became the first transgender person to appear on the cover of TIME Magazine. Cox is the first transgender person to appear on the cover of a Cosmopolitan magazine, with her February 2018 cover on the South African edition.

Cox is also the first openly transgender person to have a wax figure of herself at Madama Tussauds. She was born in Mobile, Alabama, and was raised by a single mother and grandmother within the AME Zion church. She has an identical twin brother, M Lamar, who played the pre-transitioning Sophia as Marcus in “Orange Is the New Black.” Cox has previously stated that she attempted suicide at 11 years old when she noticed she had developed feelings for her male classmates and had been bullied for several years for not acting “the way someone assigned male at birth was supposed to act.” Cox is a graduate of the Alabama School of Fine Arts in Birmingham, Alabama, where she studied creative writing before switching to dance.

Then, she studied for two years at Indiana University Bloomington before transferring to Marymount Manhattan College in New York City, where she switched from dancing to acting. During her first season on “Orange Is the New Black,” she was still appearing at a restaurant on the Lower East Side as a drag queen, where she had initially applied to work as a waitress.

What religion is Laverne Cox?

Although Cox was raised in the church, it seems she has since identified herself as agnostic. In an interview where she discussed her faith, Cox said, “I grew up in the church. When I started going through puberty, I realized that I liked boys and that there were all these things in church telling me that who I was was a sin. I started questioning that, and where I went was really self-hatred and wanting to change myself. It was tough. But I never stopped believing in God or that there was a power greater than myself. I think over the years, I’ve had moments of not believing that I’d be taken care of by my higher power. But I always am.”