Tatiana Maslany and the Boston bombing
>> It was a crisp, bright spring afternoon, and Erin Hurley was running her first marathon. Waiting for her near the finish line was her boyfriend, Jeff Baumann. Ordinarily he would not have been a spectator at the 2013 Boston Marathon, but they had recently run into each other in a bar and rekindled their relationship. With a poster of encouragement held aloft, Bauman was there to cheer on Hurley.
That was when two homemade bombs detonated 12 seconds apart, wreaking havoc in the crowd. Three people were killed and 16 survivors lost limbs, Bauman among them: Both his legs were severed. Later he would help authorities identify one of the suspects from his hospital bed.
In the new film drama Stronger, opening in the US on Friday, Jake Gyllenhaal plays Bauman, capturing not only the fluctuations of his fortitude in the wake of his injuries but also the emotional pressure he faces when he is thrust into the media spotlight as the embodiment of “Boston Strong”, the collective resilience fostered among the citizens of the Massachusetts capital after the attack.
His injuries complicate his relationship with Hurley and test the strength of their bond. While she steadfastly supports him during his recovery, she doesn’t hesitate to challenge him when she believes he is not doing enough to overcome the adversity he faces. The couple wed in 2013 but recently announced their divorce.
Stronger is directed by David Gordon Green, known for films as divergent as the pothead comedy Pineapple Express (2008) and the dark thriller Undertow (2004). To play Hurley, he chose 31-year-old Canadian Tatiana Maslany, the star of the cult-favourite science-fiction series Orphan Black.
Maslany was drawn to the project, she said, because Green was directing.
“I wanted to see what his take on this very heavy material was going to be,” Maslany said during a recent telephone interview. “And what he does bring to it is a deep humanity and a wicked sense of humour. So, at the same time, you’re able to laugh at moments of despair and you understand that such contradiction exists.”
With Green, the Canadian actress said, she found “that kind of alchemy, that connection, that unspoken thing” between actor and director which enabled her to navigate new territory with somebody whom she trusted, but who also challenged and scared her.
“David is both hands-on and hands-off at the exact same time,” she said. “He let us play, but at the same time guided us with very nuanced strokes.”
Stronger is as much Hurley’s story as it is Bauman’s, Maslany said. Aside from confronting the tragedy that would alter their lives forever, she also was dealing with issues of guilt and the complexity of her love for Jeff.
“On the page she was just so complicated,” she said. “There was so much going on with her in terms of the push-and-pull with Jeff.”
The real Hurley wasn’t present on the set, Maslany said, but was generous with her time and her story.
“I can’t imagine how odd it is to have somebody playing your life,” the actress said. “I was so grateful to have somebody to talk to about it. I related to her as a young woman. It felt way less like playing a character or a caricature as it did embodying the truth of what it means to be a young woman in a difficult relationship in a complex time in your life when everything is changing and you’re trying to find your place.”
Gyllenhaal and Maslany worked together in rehearsals and bounced ideas back and forth.
“David was really great about getting us some time and space together,” she said, “but I feel like the work that we did was separate and became very instinctive on the day. It was a lot about just being in that moment, feeling it out and wading into this murky emotional space together.”
Maslany worked with Tim Monich, one of Hollywood’s premier dialect coaches, to capture the subtleties of Hurley’s Bostonian accent.
“It’s so specific and really hard,” she said, “but Tim was amazing.”
The actress is interested in “how people communicate and how different accents feel”, she said, and thinks that knowing a number of languages has helped with accent work on set. Her mother, a translator, taught her German before she knew English. As a Canadian she was educated in a French-immersion school, and she also speaks some Spanish. For her role as a Jewish woman fleeing Nazi occupation in Woman in Gold (2015), Maslany spoke only German. In Orphan Black, playing multiple roles, she had to master British, Ukrainian and several other accents.
As Orphan Black fans know, the show cast her as a group of persecuted clones, all creations of a secretive corporate programme.
Initially, Maslany said, she was intrigued with the challenge of “getting to embody characters that I would never get to play otherwise, and how I could mine my own experience to create all these different people. The joy of being an actor is resolving and unleashing all these aspects of yourself that maybe aren’t your social, work or family personae. That’s what’s thrilling.”
When she signed onto the series, Maslany admitted, she knew the arc of her character only in the first episode.
The series delved into complex issues such as the rights of experimental subjects, the effect of cloning on identity and reproductive rights, as well as body and biology ownership. Once the series was under way and she realised the full scope of the story, Maslany said, she was grateful to be on a show that was wading into these thorny social issues.
The show, which premiered in 2013 on Space in Canada and on BBC America in the United States, and is now available on Amazon, built a committed fan base. Maslany first realised the impact of the show when she attended the San Diego Comic-Con after the show’s first season.
“I don’t think that we even knew that people were watching it until we walked out for the first panel at Comic-Con and saw hundreds of people, some of them dressed up as clones, with questions about the story and with so much love for it,” she recalled.
The fifth and final season of Orphan Black aired this summer. While Maslany will not rule out the possibility of again starring in a long-running series if the story and character are compelling, she’s currently happy to be doing “smaller pieces,” which have shorter preparation and production times.
Most recently Maslany starred opposite Dane DeHaan in the indie Two Lovers and a Bear (2016), about a couple in a small town in the Canadian Arctic struggling to help each other while battling their own personal demons.
She described the film as “Romeo and Juliet’ with this kind of tongue-in-cheek bizarre surrealism”.
The bleak drama also features a talking polar bear.
“When I read the bear’s lines in the script, I was laughing out loud,” Maslany said. “I thought it was so hilarious and so off-the-wall.”
The actress’s response to a script is always “an emotional reaction in a guttural way”, she said, but above all she’s fascinated by “people crashing up against each other, trying to live a life that they deem normal, whatever that is. And always for love. Love is a massive theme of the work that I’m interested in.”