National Post (National Edition)
TRIPLE THREAT
New Canadian series Orphan Black sees three leads played by one actress.
Tatiana Maslany has a challenging role on Orphan Black, with Sarah, the lead character. She’s a streetwise Brit, requiring the Regina-born Maslany to put on a working-class English accent.
She also has a challenging role with Beth, another lead character. And another one, named Allison. And Katjia. She plays clones. “I never wanted anything like I wanted this part,” Maslany says, sitting across a table on Orphan Black’s Toronto studio set. “But then when I got it, it was like, ‘oh, s--t.’”
Orphan Black, a Canadian series that will air on Space and BBC America, is the story of a hardluck woman who tries to take over the well-to-do life of someone who looks just like her, only to discover that they — and others — share a secret. She wants to solve the mystery of who she is, but the question of where she came from could have a dangerous answer.
It means Maslany is forever juggling characters, from Sarah to Beth — to Sarah as Beth — and others, sometimes in the same day. Or in the same scene.
Maslany, 27, a slight little thing who looks like she should be an Olympic gymnast, says she has a number of tricks to help the transition from character to character. Different music playlists, for example, to set the mood while she’s getting her makeup done.
“There are different things involving dance and movement, things I’ll do with my voice,” she says. “Wanky actor things, to be honest,” she laughs.
She says the role(s) made her realize early on “that as actors we’re just like kids playing people.” A little kid will pretend he’s a dinosaur, and then moments later his friend will tell him to be a pirate. Boom, ARRR, he’s a pirate.
“So this job kind of keys right into that,” Maslany says. “You just have to commit to it and do it.”
Her Orphan Black colleagues talk about her role with a mix of praise and wonder.
“I don’t think any actor has done what she’s done,” says Vancouver’s Dylan Bruce ( As the World Turns), who plays Beth’s impossibly handsome boyfriend, Paul. “She’s a savant with doing accents and voices, and she has
‘I don’t think any actor has done what
Maslany’s done’
different mannerisms for each character, it’s pretty amazing.”
“You have to always remember who you’re talking to,” says Jordan Gavaris ( Unnatural History), who is Felix, Sarah’s foster brother. “It’s funny, when I read the scripts, I’ll be thinking, ‘Oh, I haven’t talked to Allison for a while,’ or ‘Oh, I haven’t done a scene with Katjia for a while,’ and then you have to remember that it’s all with Tatiana. It’s a testament to her acting, really.”
(As evidence of how actors approach the challenge of adopting a different voice, Gavaris carries off his whole interview with me in Felix’s English accent, since we speak during a break between scenes. I had to double-check afterward to confirm that he was, in fact, Canadian.)
The actors all say that while Orphan Black is on one hand a mystery-thriller — and it is both slick and darkly funny — it’s also a story about characters, and not just the clones, finding themselves.
Felix, a gay man very much in touch with his feminine side, “is a side of me that I would never explore in normal circumstances, but I get to explore this whole new person and yet with a bit of a safety net around it,” Gavaris says. “I started with this idea of a feline. I was tom-catting around,” he says. He watched old videos of Mick Jagger and David Bowie to develop a sense of his movements. “But he’s evolved from these caricatures,” he says, “to a real person with real insecurities and real relationships.”
In the premiere episode, the story focuses largely on Sarah. She tries slipping into Beth’s life, but finds her seemingly perfect world was as troubled as her own. Also there’s the fact that someone seems to want her dead. There’s a lot going on, and that’s just with one of the clones. The series, co-created by Graeme Manson and John Fawcett, looks like a very fun ride.
Maslany says the unpredictability of the genre, and the show, is exciting.
“It’s of this world, but it has its own tone and its own rules and its own quirk,” she says. “Anything can happen, but its grounded by the fact that it has these real characters and real interactions and relations.
“The sci-fi element seems foreign because to me it’s a character piece. It’s people who are sometimes extreme versions of ourselves, but they are in extreme situations.”
And as for her, the juggler with all the balls in the air?
“I just have to kind of be available to the craziness of it, because it is a surreal, unnatural thing to act.”