Kate Mulgrew on controversial doc: 'I am not a geocentrist'

(Wait, what?)

So here’s the situation: On Monday, word broke that Kate Mulgrew — best known these days for playing Red on Orange Is the New Black — is the narrator of an upcoming documentary called The Principle. Spoiler alert: The principle is that contrary to Copernicus and, you know, centuries of documented science, the sun revolves around the Earth.

This is notable for several reasons, including but not limited to these:

1. If anyone should know how space works, it’s Mulgrew, who also starred as Capt. Kathryn Janeway in Star Trek: Voyager and Star Trek: Nemesis.

2. It is the year 2014.

3. And, oh yeah, the film was funded in part by Robert “Galileo Was Wrong” Sungenis, an ultra-conservative polemicist famous for claiming that the Holocaust wasn’t really that bad.

The strangest thing about this whole story is that Mulgrew wasn’t alone — a bunch of respected scientists, including theoretical physicists Michio Kaku and Lawrence Krauss, also appear in the film’s trailer:

At this point, only one question remains: Why?!

The answer: Because apparently, the makers of The Principle misled both the scientists and Mulgrew, hiding the movie’s true purpose until now. Krauss said as much earlier Tuesday in an article for Slate: “I have no recollection of being interviewed for such a film, and of course had I known of its premise I would have refused,” he writes. “So, either the producers used clips of me that were in the public domain, or they bought them from other production companies that I may have given some rights to distribute my interviews to, or they may have interviewed me under false pretenses, in which case I probably signed some release. I simply don’t know.”

And now Mulgrew has responded to the controversy as well — a good thing, since this really had the potential to wreck our enjoyment of OITNB season 2.

“I understand there has been some controversy about my participation in a documentary called The Principle,” Mulgrew writes in a note on her official Facebook page. “Let me assure everyone that I completely agree with the eminent physicist Lawrence Krauss, who was himself misrepresented in the film, and who has written a succinct rebuttal in Slate. I am not a geocentrist, nor am I in any way a proponent of geocentrism. More importantly, I do not subscribe to anything Robert Sungenis has written regarding science and history and, had I known of his involvement, would most certainly have avoided this documentary. I was a voice for hire, and a misinformed one, at that. I apologize for any confusion that my voice on this trailer may have caused.”

Phew! Although really, we should have known all along that something shady was going on; if anything, Red’s clearly a chicken-centrist.