The Many Faces of Tatiana Maslany (Published 2015) (2024)

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 circ*mstances 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.