She-hulk star Tatiana Maslany on Marvel fan sexism, Mark Ruffalo and the trauma of child actors

The Canadian actor won over the critics in Orphan Black and on Broadway in Network, then spoke out in the actors’ strike. She talks to Tom Murray about her new animated film and her reaction as a former child actor to the revelations of Quiet on Set

I’M terrified of everything,” Tatiana Maslany admits. The She-hulk star and I are on the subject of fear because, in her new animated film, Butterfly Tale, she plays a butterfly named Jennifer who is scared of heights. And just like Jennifer, the Canadian actor prefers to face her fears head-on rather than cower behind them. “I tend to push through those nerves and the fear of it, because conquering it and feeling that rush is quite exciting.”

She’s at home in Los Angeles, chatting over Zoom from her sun-drenched apartment in trendy Los Feliz. Maslany is about as far away from Hulk rage as you can imagine: she is light, funny, self-deprecating. It’s noon but she looks blurry-eyed and fresh-faced; messy brown hair falls over the hood of a cosy black sweater.

The 38-year-old has been acting for most of her life, beginning when she was just 11 years old on Canadian kids’ TV. Various small roles in film and television followed in her adulthood until she was cast as the con artist Sarah Manning and her several idiosyncratic clones in the sci-fi series, Orphan Black. It was her breakthrough.

Her ability to flip seamlessly between a volatile Ukrainian cult escapee and an icy, upper-crust Brit (among many others) firmly established her as a chameleonic character actor.

In one 2015 interview, it was noted that Maslany’s mother was on set watching her daughter and wondered aloud when Tatiana would be back.

The Guardian called it “Olympic-level” acting and her athletic feat was rewarded with an Emmy in 2016. “I remember having an acupuncturist work on me and she was like, ‘What do you do?!’” Maslany recalls of filming the exhausting five seasons. “Because there were all these weird, different energies coming out of my back. I don’t know what she saw but it felt true. There were all these little people living in me and I had to pull them out.”

She went on to star opposite Nicole Kidman in the neo-noir cop drama Destroyer before making her Broadway debut alongside Bryan Cranston in Lee Hall’s stage adaptation of Network at the end of 2018.

She took over the role of a ruthless TV executive from Downton Abbey’s Michelle Dockery in the London production, and made it her own with a performance that hilariously reinvented a scene in which her character reaches orgasm while talking about audience shares.

Then she landed perhaps her most challenging role yet — the lead part in a Marvel TV series. Released in 2022, She-hulk: Attorney

at Law followed Jennifer Walters (Maslany) as she navigated the life of a single, thirtysomething attorney who also happens to be a green, six-footseven, superpowered hulk. Walters is the cousin of Bruce Banner — alter-ego, of course, of the Hulk — who’s been played by Mark Ruffalo since 2012. The four-time Academy Award nominee appears alongside her in the series and was Maslany’s Marvel chaperone.

“He was one of the actors I looked at who had done work in that world but was also working on other weird s***,” she says. Ruffalo was nominated again at the Oscars this year for his supporting role in Yorgos Lanthimos’s Poor Things. “He was very kind, very humble. And I think the biggest lesson for me watching him is how new he makes everything. He’s played that character for 10 years and he still comes to it with this childlike wonder and curiosity.”

Despite largely positive reviews, which often singled out Maslany’s performance, SheHulk arrived at a time of “Marvel fatigue”, with audiences complaining about the relentless output of superhero spin-offs, from Echo to Ms Marvel.

Of course, it didn’t help that those projects were female-led and that Marvel’s largely male fanbase are generally not the most progressive bunch. How did she handle the inevitable wave of sexist backlash? “I think what’s exciting…” — she checks herself — “… exciting, ha. I think what’s fun about it is that [series creator] Jessica Gao built into the story that people were going to troll us.” A scene in the third episode, for example, airs fictional social media comments about Maslany’s character such as: “Why does every superhero have to be a woman now?” Sound familiar? “When we started to get