During the making of her new TV show, Tatiana Maslany felt unsure. It started during the audition process, and it was, essentially, the character’s fault. “I hadn’t been in an audition room for a very long time, and I was rusty and nervous because I felt like I didn’t know the character,” she says.
The role was the lead of Maximum Pleasure Guaranteed, a crime thriller that follows a newly-divorced mom who is managing a custody battle while also attempting to solve the murder of a camboy who had been blackmailing her. Maslany was intrigued by how much she was struggling to “put a finger on” the character of Paula, as well as the show’s mystery elements and the intense dynamics between Paula, her ex-husband (played by Jake Johnson) and his new wife (Barry’s Jessy Hodges). She was also excited about the chance to reunite with director David Gordon Green years after their collaboration on Stronger — and the fact that they were even doing auditions at all. “It’s wackadoo that we’re not doing real auditions anymore,” she says. “I think self-tapes make people so self-conscious. They need to be able to be fearless and unencumbered and not worried about what their face looks like — that’s the whole fucking job.”
Despite getting the job, her confusion remained. “I just kept thinking, who is Paula? It was a constant search for me all the way to episode 10,” she says. “But she’s asking herself that exact same question.”
Maslany in Maximum Pleasure Guaranteed.
Courtesy of Apple TV
Maslany, who has been working in the industry for almost 25 years, says this sort of risk — a role that feels a little dangerous, on a project that is otherwise set up for success thanks to the backing of Apple TV and veteran showrunners — is exactly what she’s looking for. The actress, now 40, grew up in Saskatchewan and got her start in Canadian television. She broke out in 2013 with Orphan Black, the genre-bending thriller about human clones in which she played five different lead characters. “I remember going to Comic-Con, a lot of those convention center rooms are full of people waiting for the next panel, but then I realized they were dressed up for our show,” she says. “And they had stories about watching it with their parents or connecting with someone in Brazil about the show. It was really global.”
Orphan Black became a cult classic and earned Maslany one Emmy win and two additional nominations. It also taught her, rather ruthlessly, about the ways that set life can turn on a person. “I had heart palpitations after working on it,” she says. “I didn’t sleep properly for years. We’d start on Monday at 5:00 a.m., and by Friday we’d be starting at 5:00 p.m. and going until 5:00 a.m. on Saturday morning. And then I’d have to try and turn it around for the next week. It was unnecessarily exhausting.”
Many actors who start young have an embedded over-gratitude — they’re so thankful to be working that they say yes to everything. That attitude, which she describes as “Tell me what you need me to do and I’ll do it,” followed her to some of her subsequent jobs. After Orphan, she starred opposite Jake Gyllenhaal in the Boston Marathon tearjerker Stronger, and then as the coveted lead role in Marvel’s She-Hulk miniseries. After She-Hulk came the writers and actors strikes, which she credits for waking her up to the power of collective labor. Now, she’s better at advocating for herself on set and also makes a concerted effort to understand the experiences of every single worker in a production.
“You get paid good money on big studio productions, but actors’ contracts are a totally different thing than everybody else’s and I have trouble talking about that because I feel like the double standard is so intense,” she says. “A lot of Marvel stuff is non-union for the crew, so any luxuries go only to the actors.”
She has conversations about this with many of her fellow actors, about how to work in this field that’s getting swallowed up by conglomerates without feeling like you’re part of a larger system that you can’t abide by. “So much is changing so quickly, and that’s why things like ‘the inevitability of AI’ — I’m putting that in quotes — are bullshit,” she says. “It’s not inevitable. It’s a thing we’re being as sold as, it’s inevitable and it’s coming for our jobs, and it doesn’t have to. We don’t have to succumb to that. We can advocate for real people, for labor law, for the rights of all workers.” Now, Maslany gives extra attention to the way that any production operates, like whether they offer points on the backend to the entire crew.
Maximum Pleasure Guaranteed
Courtesy of Apple TV
When Maslany arrived on the set of Maximum Pleasure Guaranteed, she was armed with strong beliefs about the way she should be behaving as number one on the call sheet (making the environment as warm as possible, welcoming day players into the fold, getting Van Leeuwen ice cream trucks for everyone), but still didn’t really know what to do about Paula, the enigma. When the show opens, Paula is having cyber sex with Trevor (planned by Brandon Flynn), the camboy she’s been chatting with occasionally, while decorating her new divorced-mom apartment (her ex, meanwhile, is ensconced in a gorgeous Brooklyn brownstone). She witnesses his brutal kidnapping, and the ensuing days see her teetering on the edge as her dealings with the NYPD threaten to reveal her proclivities to her ex-husband and get in the way of her delicate performances as Mom Who Has It All Together.
“I’m not a mother, I don’t know the in’s and out’s of it, so there’s a sense of fraudulence when I’m playing one,” says Maslany. “But that also feels right for Paula. Everyone is like, are you fit to do this? There’s a defensiveness and a clumsiness.”
There was potential for some of the camboy scenes to feel clumsy, too, but the show’s directors had a plan for that. They built two side-by-side sets, one for Paula’s apartment and one for Trevor’s, with cameras filming each of them as they acted on the web cam to each other. “Brandon and I did feel that we had intimacy, even though we never got to touch each other or were breaking in the same space together while we acted.”
When Maximum Pleasure Guaranteed premieres on May 20, Maslany hopes that audiences go on the same journey that she did. “I don’t know how people are going to read Paula, I don’t know how they’re going to feel and that’s exciting,” she says. “My hope is that by the end you’re uncertain about Paula. That there are questions about her choices that are uncomfortable. She’s reckless and impulsive and I love that.”
