Maslany takes role and runs with it
When Tatiana Maslany first learned she’d been cast opposite Jake Gyllenhaal in the biopic Stronger, she started running. She still hasn’t stopped. The Regina actress, famous for five seasons of Orphan Black, stars in Stronger as Erin Hurley, who was running the Boston Marathon in 2013 when terrorists detonated two bombs near the finish line.
Hurley wasn’t hurt, but her boyfriend, Jeff Bauman (played by Gyllenhaal), lost both legs in the attack.
Speaking at the Toronto International Film Festival, where Stronger had its world première, Maslany says she was able to spend time with Hurley, and also credits a strong screenplay by John Pollono, itself based on a book by Bauman. But running was a big part of getting into the part.
“I ran every morning, and that was this meditative time that I could just be in that character and daydream and imagine,” she says. “Every time I do she invariably pops into my head — the character and real Erin.”
She continues to run today. “It would be cool to be able to be at the point where I wasn’t fighting being in my body,” she says.
“Because right now it’s just coming up against the limits of what I’m able to do.”
Gyllenhaal faced his own challenges, playing an able-bodied man who becomes a double amputee.
“The pain I knew I would never be able to get close to,” he says.
“Every time I think about the preparation for this role, I sort of knew I was set out to fail.
“There’s nothing I could get at by pretending that was going to touch the real thing.”
Even so, he studied not just the consequences of amputation, but all the procedures and processes around it.
“I could understand the effects on the body,” he says.
“I could understand the effects of the painkillers on the body, even the pallor of one’s skin and what those drugs do to you during recovery.”
Maslany remembers the day she had a throwaway scene that involved asking a waitress if she could settle her bill.
Director David Gordon Green, known for Pineapple Express among others, decided not to make it easy.
“He just kept giving her these weird-ass lines to say to me.
“It was the simplest scene and she was a day player — he didn’t have to do that.
“But I think he’s so intrigued by what any moment could open up, and what any off-kilter thing could do to the performance.
“He keeps you off kilter all the time. It’s a really great way to work. You never know what’s going to come at you and you never know how you’re going to react to it.”