While preparing her new TV show, Tatiana Maslany felt uncertain. It started during the audition process, and it was basically the character’s fault. “I wasn’t in the audition room for a very long time, and I was nervous and nervous because I felt like I didn’t know the character,” she says.
The main role was for Maximum enjoyment guaranteeda crime thriller that follows a recently divorced mother who manages a custody battle while also trying to solve the murder of a young man who was blackmailing her. Maslany was fascinated by how much she struggled to “put her finger on” Paula’s character, as well as the show’s mystery elements and the intense dynamics between Paula, her ex-husband (played by Jake Johnson) and his new wife (played byBarryJesse Hodges). She was also excited about the opportunity to reunite with director David Gordon Green after years of their collaboration Stronger -And the fact that they were auditioning at all. “It’s weird that we don’t do real auditions anymore,” she says. “I think self-tapes make people feel very ashamed of themselves. They should be able to be brave and unburdened and not worried about what their face looks like — that’s the whole damn job.”
Although she got the job, her confusion remained. “I kept thinking, ‘Who is Paula?’ It was a constant search for me until episode 10,” she says. “But she’s asking herself the exact same question.”
Maslany, who has been in the industry for nearly 25 years, says that kind of risk — a role that seems a bit dangerous, in a project that’s set up for success thanks to the backing of Apple TV and veteran directors — is exactly what she’s looking for. The actress, 40, grew up in Saskatchewan and got her start in Canadian television. It broke out in 2013 with Black orphana genre-bending thriller about human clones in which she played five different main characters. “I remember going to Comic-Con, and a lot of the convention center halls were full of people waiting for the next panel, but then I realized they were dressed for our show,” she says. “And they had stories about watching it with their parents or reaching out to someone in Brazil about the show. It was really global.”
Black orphan It became a cult classic and earned Maslany an Emmy Award win and two additional nominations. She also taught her, without mercy, the ways life can turn against a person. “I had heart palpitations after working on it,” she says. “I didn’t sleep properly for years. We would start on Monday at 5:00 a.m., and by Friday we would start at 5:00 p.m. and continue until 5:00 a.m. on Saturday. And then I would have to try to change things up for the next week. It was unnecessarily stressful.”
Many actors who start out at a young age have a sense of excessive gratitude – they are so grateful for the work that they say yes to everything. This attitude, which she describes as “tell me what you want me to do and I’ll do it,” followed her into some of her later jobs. after orphanshe starred opposite Jake Gyllenhaal in the tearjerker Boston Marathon Strongerhence the coveted lead role in Marvel’s She-Hulk series. after She-Hulk Then came the writers’ and actors’ strikes, which she credits with awakening her to the power of collective action. She is now better at advocating for herself on set and is also making a concerted effort to understand the experiences of every worker in the production.
“You get good money for big studio productions, but actors’ contracts are very different from everyone else’s contracts, and I find it difficult to talk about that because I feel like the double standards are so severe,” she says. “A lot of Marvel work is non-union for the crew, so any luxuries go only to the actors.”
She’s had conversations about this with many of her fellow actors, about how to work in this industry that’s being swallowed up by conglomerates without feeling like you’re part of a larger system that you can’t adhere to. “A lot is changing very quickly, which is why things like ‘AI determinism’ – I put that in quotes – are just nonsense,” she says. “It’s not inevitable. It’s something we’re sold as, it’s inevitable and it comes to our jobs, and it’s not necessary. We don’t have to give in to it. We can stand up for real people, for labor law, for the rights of all workers.” Now, Maslany pays extra attention to the way any production works, such as whether they provide spots on the backend for the entire crew.
When Maslany arrived on set Maximum enjoyment guaranteedwas armed with strong beliefs about how she should act as number one on the call sheet (making the environment as warm as possible, welcoming day players into the fold, getting Van Leeuwen ice cream trucks for everyone), but she still didn’t really know what to do about Paula, the enigma. When the show begins, Paula is having cybersex with Trevor (planned by Brandon Flynn), a young man with whom she occasionally chats, while decorating her newly divorced mother’s apartment (meanwhile, her ex-husband is hiding out in a gorgeous brownstone in Brooklyn). She witnesses his brutal kidnapping, and the following days see her teetering on the edge as her brush with the NYPD threatens to reveal her predilections for her ex-husband and derail her delicate performance as a mother who has it all together.
“I’m not a mother, and I don’t know the ins and outs, so there’s a feeling of fraud when I play a game,” Maslany says. “But it also feels right for Paula. Everyone’s like, ‘Are you qualified to do this?’ There’s defensiveness and goofiness.”
There was a possibility that some of the campo scenes would look clumsy as well, but the show’s directors had a plan for that. They built two side-by-side sets, one for Paula’s apartment and the other for Trevor’s, with cameras filming each of them as they acted on webcam with each other. “Brandon and I felt like we had an intimate connection, even though we couldn’t touch each other or invade the same space together while we were acting.”
when Maximum enjoyment guaranteed Debuting on May 20, Maslany hopes audiences will go on the same journey she did. “I don’t know how people will read Paula, I don’t know how they’ll feel and that’s exciting,” she says. “I hope that in the end, she is unsure about Paula. That there are uncomfortable questions about her choices. She is reckless and reckless and I love that.”
