Helena Do I Look Like im Trying to Be Funny
The Many Faces of Tatiana Maslany
The grand adventure of a set visit is entering a universe where everyone — absolutely everyone — is a pro at playing pretend. They're admirably adult about it. They drink coffee and sit in chairs and operate machines, as if there weren't lights so hot that they banish the winter outside, as if it's perfectly normal for a sweltering interior to look like a dusty, sunbaked facade. Insides become outsides here, as gravel underfoot transforms a soundstage floor into a sandy desert.
But the illusions are particularly vertiginous on the set of "Orphan Black," the BBC America television show that has the same star many times over. "Orphan Black," you see, is about a group of persecuted clones, and all of them are played by Tatiana Maslany, a 29-year-old actress who has ridden her multiple roles to cult stardom and critical acclaim. On a recent morning in Toronto, Maslany was wearing a frizzy blond wig and was made up as Helena, the dangerously mercurial Ukrainian clone. Her face was covered in blood and filth. She was not — as far as I could tell — thinking about the Screen Actors Guild Award nomination she received that morning, or (as I was) the circumstances that landed her in the peculiar fishbowl of fame. She was focused instead on butter.
The crew was getting ready to shoot the other half of a two-clone scene they had started the day before, when Maslany was playing Sarah Manning, a street-smart con woman and the protagonist of the show. Helena, by contrast, is a cult escapee with homicidal tendencies and a ravenous, animalistic relationship with food. The director of this episode, David Frazee, and Maslany were working through how Helena's insatiable appetite would affect her behavior in this scene. There was butter present in the shot, but it was not there to be eaten. Would Helena be able to resist? Even a tiny taste?
"Are you going to lick the butter?" Frazee asked.
The cast and crew of "Orphan Black" labor painstakingly over minutiae like this, in the service of a much grander contemplation (or, perhaps, demolition) of female televisual archetypes. The show's premise allows Maslany to portray a bewilderingly diverse set of stock characters — the punk-rock con artist, Sarah; the shrewish suburban housewife, Alison Hendrix; the geeky stoner, Cosima Niehaus; the Ukrainian psychopath, Helena; the icily aloof career woman, Rachel Duncan; the pill-popping cop, Elizabeth Childs; and many others — encompassing almost every trope women get to play in Hollywood and on TV. (Maslany's legions of adoring fans call themselves #CloneClub on Twitter and contend that the credits on "Orphan Black" should say "Tatiana Maslany" nine or more times, once per clone.)
In its subject matter, "Orphan Black" broods on the nature-nurture debate in human biology, but in its execution, the show cleverly extends the same question to matters of genre. What does the exact same woman look like if you grow her in the petri dish of "Desperate Housewives" or on a horror-film set in Eastern Europe? What about a police procedural? The result is a revelation: Instead of each archetype existing as the lone female character in her respective universe, these normally isolated tropes find one another, band together and seek to liberate themselves from the evil system that created them.
By structuring the story around the clones' differences, "Orphan Black" seems to suggest that the dull sameness enforced by existing female archetypes needs to die. Early in the first season, there is a serial killer hunting down the clones — it turns out to be Helena, the Ukrainian — who ritualistically dismembers Barbie dolls after dyeing their hair to match that of her next victim. It's a creepy touch, but one that can also be read as a metacriticism of how women are used on TV: the punishing beauty standards to which they're held, the imposed uniformity. (Need a new sitcom wife? Grab the prototype and change the hairstyle.) Our low tolerance for difference among female characters means that they will almost always be less interesting, less memorable and less beloved than their male counterparts. In this context, Helena becomes a kind of hero, slaughtering televisual conformity and constituting, in both her savagery and her warmth, a radical expansion of what women on television can be. And each character, including the criminally insane one, gets considerable attention and respect, even when it comes to questions about butter.
"I'll keep my tongue in my mouth," Maslany finally told the director as she wandered over to the craft-service table, grabbing a brisket sandwich from a nearby tray. "These are so good, they're toasted," she told me, chewing happily and offering me some. I declined, and congratulated her on her SAG Award nomination.
She thanked me and then deflected further discussion of the matter. "I'm thinking about this butter," she said, feigning seriousness. "Whether to lick it or not."
Video
transcript
transcript
Tatiana Maslany as Anywoman
As the star of "Orphan Black," a show about a group of persecuted clones, Maslany portrays a diverse set of characters.
-
No script.
When one person has spent so much time looking and the other has spent so much time being looked at, the imbalance creates strange social torque. I first laid eyes on Maslany in person while she was performing an intense scene as Sarah. Our normal relationship — spectator, spectated — was still intact. Compared with the rest of the clones, Sarah has swagger: Even under duress, she's serious and cool. So when the scene ended and Maslany skipped, somewhat goofily, down the steps to say hello, I was caught off guard. All I could say for sure about the person whose hand I was shaking was that she seemed committed to resisting the informational asymmetry of fame. She looked back hard.
Wavy-haired and theatrically dirty, Maslany spoke in Sarah's lower-class British accent between takes. (She kept it up until they broke for lunch.) She was warm and self-assured and modest and frank. She exuded a contagious ease. In our very first conversation, we bonded over the unsung virtues of the adult onesie. "I had one that had the butt-flap until after high school," she told me. I was as charmed as I was suspicious. Was it just another performance? Or an admission that she would prefer to be covered up?
Great acting is as much about destruction — selective, temporary self-annihilation — as creation, so it's fitting that "Orphan Black" starts with a suicide. Sarah happens to see a woman throw herself off a subway platform, and when she catches a glimpse of the woman's face, she sees that it's identical to her own. We quickly learn that Sarah, along with several other women, are clones — products of a long-running clandestine corporate experiment. And all of them are in danger.
The clones eventually join forces, which means that Maslany winds up playing as many as four characters in one scene. These performances weren't just a revelation to audiences; they astonished people close to Maslany. Frazee, recalling one of the first multiple-clone scenes he shot, said, "I remember thinking, [the clones] are so different, we probably could have gotten away with different actors who look similar." He shook his head and added, "I couldn't see, at all, the same person." Stephen Lynch, the show's makeup artist, told me that he is often asked what prosthetic piece he uses for a particular clone's nose. (The answer: none.) Once, Maslany's mother was on set watching her own daughter and wondered aloud when Tatiana would be back.
Nominally the story of how the clones find one another and team up to fight an escalating series of threats to their autonomy, "Orphan Black" grapples with the violent intersection between technology and female agency. In the eyes of their creators, the clones' humanity is trumped by their value as intellectual property. The question at the show's heart is whether the clones have free will and the right to lead normal lives, or if they are valuable only as experimental subjects to be monitored, impregnated, sterilized and policed. "It's so thematically connected to feminist issues," Graeme Manson, one of the show's creators, told me. "Who owns you, who owns your body, your biology? Who controls reproduction?"
Because this sisterhood arises among the clones, Maslany not only had to convincingly play against herself on-screen, but also had to portray the fluid, complex, evolving relationships between her various selves as the series developed. The technical challenges were major, the shooting schedule exhausting — she is in almost every scene, often two or more times — yet the emotional work was particularly rough going.
"I didn't sleep, really," Maslany said of the first two seasons. "I just was shifting. I'd have to do shifts during the day where I'd be Cosima for the first half and then Helena — or whatever, Cosima and then Sarah. So my body was physically shifting in my sleep, and I could feel it."
The secret code name for "Orphan Black" at Pinewood Toronto Studios is "Time Vampire." It's also the crew's nickname for the Technodolly, a telescoping camera crane that memorizes and repeats complex movements exactly, enabling a multiple-clone scene to be constructed in layers. Maslany does the scene as each clone twice — once using a double (or doubles) to get the blocking, timing and shadows right, and then once without. Because the camera movements are identical from take to take, they can be layered together in postproduction. When shooting the scene the second time, Maslany uses suspended tennis balls or marks on the wall that signal where her eye line should be. While "Orphan Black" also employs stationary-camera shots, the Technodolly allows for a more dynamic feel. "To me," said John Fawcett, the show's other creator, "it makes the shot a little bit more interesting and a little bit more fluid and a little more organic. The camera is moving the way it should in a normal shot." It's a brilliant piece of technology, but it eats time the way Helena eats chicken. Even its real name sounds sinister.
And yet the kind of emotional cohesion "Orphan Black" produces requires more than a Technodolly. Though she is rarely even seen on the show, Maslany's primary body double, Kathryn Alexandre, is crucial to the process. An actor in her own right, Alexandre has learned the physicality and the accent for each clone, so that Maslany has someone to play off in a multiple-clone scene. Maslany sings Alexandre's praises often, because there's a reciprocity to their craft. Alexandre is often the first to play a clone in a scene — she stood in as Helena my first day on set, Sarah the second — so her dramatic choices often influence Maslany's performance. The final result is a mishmash of at least five different takes (and occasionally, body parts). "You never know where an arm might come from," Fawcett said. "Sometimes it might be Tatiana's body and Kathryn's arm."
Image
All joking aside, "Time Vampire" also encapsulates what "Orphan Black" could have been without Maslany's nuanced performance: a show so bogged down in its technical ambition and so in love with the possibilities of its own technology that it seemed mechanical. Instead, the final product feels organic, natural, real. When one clone pours another clone a glass of wine, you're so engrossed by the dynamic developing between them that you barely notice you've just witnessed an extraordinary feat of engineering.
My second day on set, Maslany and I played hooky, sort of: Instead of eating in the sterile conference room, where we had the day before, Maslany suggested we spend the lunch hour lounging on the set of Alison's living room. It wasn't in use, so the furniture was covered with dropcloths, and the set was cozily dark. We talked about high school.
Maslany grew up in Regina, the second-largest city in Saskatchewan, which — as she's the first to point out — isn't saying much. ("Rhymes with 'vagina,' " she said with a groan.) Her parents, Renate and Danny, are Regina natives of German extraction. She started doing improv in elementary school and continued in high school, eventually joining the General Fools, a theater group dedicated to experimental long-form improv. By high school, she was often traveling for acting work. "Being in high school was weirder to me than being on set," Maslany said. "I'd go away for two months and shoot something and be totally at home, and then come back to school and be like, How do I talk to people?"
"I had a good group of friends," Maslany said, "and I was on the improv team, but it didn't feel like my thing. I hid behind bangs and glasses." She left Regina for Toronto when she was 20, she said, and it has remained her base ever since.
Improv is laborious play, and that same tension between work and fun was a running theme in my conversations about Maslany. Everyone told me about her fearsome work ethic, but they also marveled at her ability to stay spontaneous and responsive. "What I really like about Tat is that I sense that she trusts what she's doing," Ari Millen, another actor on the show, told me. He plays a group of male clones in the third season, which starts on April 18, and told me that he has been trying to get the performances right by silencing his ego and eradicating self-judgment the way Maslany does. He used the word "forgiveness" to describe this practice. "She isn't fighting her work to get the product that she's preordained as the right performance."
I asked Maslany how she manages to combine the enormous preparation her work requires with that improvisational freedom, especially given the technical constraints of "Orphan Black." She told me that she prepares less intensively these days, that she has become a less intellectual, more "watery" actor. When I pressed her to explain how she manages to act so naturally as she navigates the maze of dangling tennis balls, we hit an interesting wall.
"Yeah, I don't know," she said. "I don't know. It just becomes, not second nature. . . . I don't know. I don't know." She tried again to articulate her process but collapsed into gesticulation. "It's kind of hard to speak to. But it is a mix of technical dut-dut-dut" — she gestured rhythmically with her hands — "and just kind of breathing and trusting." All of a sudden, she burped. "What did I eat? What's going on?"
By then, in Alison's living room, Maslany seemed less guarded than when we first met. The Helena wig was off, and the accent was gone. It isn't often that you get to ask someone what it's like to become famous as they're becoming famous. So I asked.
She expressed some ambivalence about the way fame produces demand, especially in an age of social media. "People just want want want want stuff," she said. There are awards shows, red carpets; she appreciates it all, but is careful not to let it control her. "You exist without this stuff," she said. "This stuff doesn't define you or anything." Maslany has pointed out that her "Orphan Black" characters, too, must deal with the discovery that they are — in some sense — property and refuse to let it define them. "That always resonated for me as a woman," she told Vanity Fair in an interview, "this idea of our bodies not being our own. That they're owned by someone else. That the image of them is owned by someone else."
Image
Maslany's filmography constitutes an accidental treatise on people's becoming images owned by others. She plays a young Maria Altmann in the forthcoming film "Woman in Gold," which is about her character's fight for ownership of a Klimt portrait of her aunt. (She did the whole performance in German.) Her 2010 film "Grown Up Movie Star" is about a teenage girl who poses suggestively for her father's friend but bridles when he interprets her consent to be photographed as consent for more. In "The Nativity," a four-part mini-series covering Mary and Joseph's courtship and the birth of Jesus, Maslany plays Mary — the most famous icon in the world — in the days before she becomes a saint or the mother of Christ.
I asked Maslany if she was affected by playing this hallowed role. "I did miss my period when I came home," she said, laughing. "It was the only time it had ever happened in my entire life." Above all, though, she felt overwhelmed. "I was like, I don't deserve to play this part," she said. "This is way too big for me. But I think that feeling can often serve you, when you just go, O.K., maybe that's how that character feels. Mary doesn't feel she deserves this huge thing that's been given to her. She's an impostor, because she's not a saint, she's just a normal person."
On "Orphan Black," the clones fight constantly for control of their own lives and bodies, and Maslany obliquely linked their struggle to her own experience with the publicity machine. "This is about volition and autonomy," she said of the show, "and that was resonating with me, being an actor who was suddenly being interviewed or being dressed."
It was an offhand remark, but the connection she drew between self-ownership and the alienating experience of press interviews — especially given our circumstances — was as subtle as it was smart. I thought about it that night, back at my hotel. Interviewing is a strange business, and I was impressed by the tact and frankness with which Maslany had articulated her discomfort. "Glancing blow, warmly delivered," I scribbled in my notebook.
Weeks later, Maslany walked the red carpet at the SAG Awards, dressed and styled to the teeth. She smiled brightly. Her fans cheered her gleefully on Twitter. But when Maria Menounos invited her to use the "mani-cam" to display her nails and jewelry (an invitation some actors walking the red carpet refused, finding it sexist), she bashfully confessed that she hadn't gotten her nails done and then pulled off what I've come to think of as the ultimate Maslany maneuver: She stuck her unmanicured hand in and gave the camera a thumbs-up, concealing her nails. A glancing blow, warmly delivered.
An unapologetic feminist, Maslany is frequently hailed as a purveyor of Strong Female Characters. Though appreciative, Maslany finds this a reductive formulation. "That's so boring!" she said, and went on to condemn the way female strength gets shoehorned into the confines of male-dominated narratives. "What about the strength of this uncharted territory we've never explored on camera? We haven't seen them yet, they're not archetypes yet, because they're all related to male expression."
She cited Gena Rowlands, in her role as Mabel in John Cassavetes's 1974 film "A Woman Under the Influence," as a truly innovative model for a Strong Female Character. The film concerns Mabel, a housewife and misfit, and her husband, Nick, played by Peter Falk. Mabel is spectacularly eccentric but desperately wants not to be. Scenes in which she tries to be a good hostess or order a drink at a bar are spellbinding failures. She's eventually sent away to an asylum to be "cured," and she and her husband deal with the aftermath.
"Her performance is so strong to me, because it's full of vulnerability, full of fragility, full of nuttiness," Maslany said. "Like, she's big in this movie. She does things I've never seen a woman — or a man or anybody — do on camera, like these little tics and things like that that are so funny and so bizarre. That's what I want to see. Like, I don't want to see a robotic woman in a cat suit who can kick ass. I don't give a [expletive] about that. It's just not real."
Maslany was most at ease when we talked about anything but her, so I decided to provoke her a little by reading to her from Pauline Kael's famous evisceration of that film in The New Yorker. Kael felt that Mabel was herself a tired trope: the holy fool, "a crazy person . . . endowed with a clarity of vision that the warped society can't tolerate, and so is persecuted."
"The romantic view of insanity is a perfect subject for Cassavetes to muck around with," Kael wrote. "Yet even in this season when victimization is the hottest thing in the movie market, this scapegoat heroine doesn't do a damn thing for him." Maslany bristled at Kael's characterization of Mabel's condition.
"But it's not about insanity!" Maslany exclaimed. "Her emotional life is so enormous that it can't be contained, and I think there's something really beautiful about that. It's weird to call it insanity, or weird to dismiss her as a victim. I don't see her as a victim in the slightest. She's just off. She's off. She's just odd."
I confessed that I agreed with her. Watching "A Woman Under the Influence," I too fell for Rowlands and her fragile, nutty, compellingly huge character.
Maslany described her favorite scene in the film to me. She prefaced this by saying, "It's not the most feminist scene on the planet." In it, Mabel has returned from being institutionalized and manages to perform a broken kind of normalcy with some success. But her husband can't take it; he's devastated by what she has become — what he has done to her. He tries to slap her back to herself. "It's just the two of them silhouetted, and he's slapping her and going, Bah-bah! Bah-bah!" Maslany said. "And he's telling her to do the thing that she does, which is just be herself. He can't handle the fact that she's been sent away to be changed and to be made homogeneous and made easy to palate."
There are traces of Mabel in Maslany's Helena, whom Maslany allows to become off-putting and even genuinely frightening in ways that female characters rarely get to be. Mabel is not the safe, charming bumbler of the romantic comedy. Nor is Helena, who is erratic, hilarious and homicidal — but never predictable. As Maslany put it, "she'll probably poop on your face or something." Maslany cherishes roles that leave room for that kind of unlikability and risk. "The greatest gift as an actor," she said, "is you get to go, Well, I'm doing this as a character, but really, this is me, this is me at my worst, my worst bits of me."
On my last day at the "Orphan Black" set, Maslany was tired, having worked for 17 hours the day before. In a way, her exhaustion made things easier for us. We could talk about whatever, as long as it wasn't her. We chatted about Lena Dunham's on-screen nudity. ("It's normal now, isn't it?" she said admiringly.) She called me out — rightly, and in the nicest way possible — for internalized sexism when I compared Tina Fey unfavorably with Amy Poehler. "You don't pit the Coen brothers against each other, you know what I mean?" She's right, of course. It brought to mind the narrative cleverness of "Orphan Black," which joins the clones together rather than make them compete.
One of the most interesting things about the show, and its metacriticism of the genres it juggles, isn't just how elegantly it addresses the solitude that the lone female character on many shows suffers in her particular TV universe. It's also how resolutely the show refuses to place these genres in opposition to one another. There's no condescension here; Alison's suburbia gets as much visual and narrative respect as Rachel's evil corporate empire. The characters find one another because the system that produced them and scattered them is breaking down. What emerges is a full, generative map of the possibilities that emerge when you let the Strong Female Character and her lonely sisters from other genres mix. By exploring the different directions that "genetic identicals" can take when differently nurtured, "Orphan Black" shows what a single actor can do when given the opportunity — and, by extension, reveals the interesting stories that emerge when women are afforded the chance to exist in rich narrative relation to one another.
Despite Maslany's reluctance, I managed to steer our conversation back to her magical quick-change act. I still wanted to know how she does it. "I think there's something about being prepared enough that you can surrender," she said. Then she quoted to me something the dancer Martha Graham told the choreographer Agnes de Mille in 1943.
At the time, de Mille was confused and bewildered by her sudden rise to fame, and Graham offered her words of encouragement. It is a beautiful pep talk, practically written in verse. I can see why it has special meaning for Maslany as she navigates the challenges of the fishbowl herself. The part Maslany recounted to me is this: "It is not your business to determine how good it is, nor how valuable it is, nor how it compares with other expressions. It is your business to keep it yours clearly and directly, to keep the channel open."
De Mille asked Graham when she would feel satisfied, and Graham replied: "There is no satisfaction whatever at any time. There is only a queer, divine dissatisfaction, a blessed unrest that keeps us marching and makes us more alive than the others." I asked Maslany what her divine dissatisfaction was. "I don't know how I would label it right now," she said. "I think if I looked back on this time, I'd probably see where it lived."
babbagephompecture.blogspot.com
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/05/magazine/the-many-faces-of-tatiana-maslany.html