Tatiana Maslany Is Still Looking for a Role That Asks Her to Be One Person

The trick that made Tatiana Maslany famous is the one she has spent the longest stretch of her career trying not to repeat. On Orphan Black she played the lead and almost a dozen of her own scene partners — different walks, different accents, different bone structures inside the same face — and the part won her an Emmy that no Canadian had won before in a major dramatic category for a Canadian series. The job description that came back from the industry after that was a problem: she had become the actress who could be anyone, which is closer to a parlor trick than a career.

She grew up in Regina, Saskatchewan, the daughter of a woodworker and a translator who taught her German before she had English. She started dancing at four, writing plays for her brothers by nine, and landed her first stage part in the Regina Summer Stage production of Oliver! at the age most kids meet a school choir. Dr. Martin LeBoldus Catholic High School took her through 2003; a half-semester at the University of Regina, where she signed up for German, Ancient Greek, philosophy, psychology and film, finished her academic curiosity off. She moved to Toronto at twenty and took the parts that pile up around any working Canadian actor in their twenties — a small role in David Cronenberg’s Eastern Promises, a teenage anything on Heartland, the third lead on Being Erica.

Grown Up Movie Star, a small Newfoundland drama, won her a special jury prize at Sundance in 2010 and a brief look from American casting. The Vow nudged her into a wide-release supporting role two years later. None of that predicted what came next. Orphan Black was a low-budget Canadian co-production with BBC America; the premise was clones; the casting decision was that one actress would have to play all of them and convince the audience they were the same actress only by accident. Across five seasons she did that and accumulated five Canadian Screen Awards, two Critics’ Choice Television Awards, a TCA award, the 2016 Emmy, and a place in the medium’s history that the show itself never quite reached.

What happens to a performer like that next is the interesting question, and her answer was almost programmatic. She played the younger Maria Altmann opposite Helen Mirren in Woman in Gold, the Holocaust-restitution drama, then disappeared into a Newfoundland snowstorm with Dane DeHaan and a literal bear for Two Lovers and a Bear at Cannes Directors’ Fortnight. The Other Half got her a Canadian Screen Award for best actress in a feature. She held the screen opposite Jake Gyllenhaal in Stronger, the Boston Marathon biopic that had to be told from the partner’s vantage to work at all, and then took the role of a corrupt detective’s daughter opposite Nicole Kidman in Karyn Kusama’s Destroyer. None of those parts asked her to do the clone trick. That was the point.

The critical complaint that has shadowed her career since 2017 is that the industry never quite found a use for what she did on Orphan Black. The Emmy was supposed to translate; it did not, at least not in the form most Emmy winners cash in. She has been attached to projects that did not materialize, cast in films that opened small, and given two showcase parts in franchise vehicles — She-Hulk: Attorney at Law in 2022 and a recurring run as a Starfleet officer’s mother in the now-cancelled Star Trek: Starfleet Academy this year — that read more like the industry trying her on for a particular kind of fit than her trying on the parts. Marvel’s She-Hulk in particular was a peculiar engagement: a half-hour sitcom inside the studio’s serious universe, half motion-capture, half fourth-wall demolition, that critics either embraced as a thesis on the brand’s tics or filed away as a misfire. Maslany did the work the show needed. Whether the show knew what to do with her was a separate question.

The stage has been a kinder testing ground. She made her Broadway debut opposite Bryan Cranston in Ivo van Hove’s Network as Diana Christensen, the role Faye Dunaway had played for Sidney Lumet decades earlier, and the live audience saw her work the part as television-within-theatre. She returned with Laurie Metcalf in Joe Mantello’s Grey House and then, off-Broadway, in Marin Ireland’s Pre-Existing Condition. None of those productions asked her to play more than one person on a given night. That, by her own framing in interviews, has been part of the appeal.

Her current run is the kind of choice that maps a career rather than caps it. The Monkey, Osgood Perkins’s 2025 Stephen King horror, slotted her into a genre register she had not really tested. This week on Apple TV she headlines Maximum Pleasure Guaranteed, a dark comedy thriller from creator David J. Rosen and director David Gordon Green, playing Paula, a newly divorced soccer mom whose custody battle gets folded into the murder of a camboy who had been blackmailing her. The first two episodes went up on May 20 with a weekly rollout through July 15. The early reviews compare her performance to her best stretches on Orphan Black for a reason; the show, which she also produces, was built to keep her in one identity across ten episodes and watch her break it from the inside instead. The ensemble around her — Jake Johnson as the ex-husband, Murray Bartlett, Dolly de Leon, Charlie Hall, Brandon Flynn, Jon Michael Hill — gives her people to bounce against rather than versions of herself to play.

She lives in Los Angeles with her husband, the actor Brendan Hines, whom she married quietly in 2022 and announced from a Stephen Colbert couch afterwards. Her younger brother Daniel acts in Toronto; the other brother, Michael, animates. Her German is still better than her Spanish.

Maslany has spent the years since 2017 looking for a part that would let her play one person at a time and still feel like the only person who could play her. Paula, the soccer mom with the dead camboy and the spreadsheet for a custody case, is the closest she has come yet. The next test arrives next Wednesday.