When Tatiana Maslany was 20, she wondered whether acting was really for her. The Canadian was already 11 years into her career, having begun working as a child, and had recently relocated from Regina in Saskatchewan to Toronto in order to be where the jobs were. “I suddenly had this urge to re-evaluate why I was doing it,” she says. “Was I just doing it because it was this thing I did as a kid?” But then she watched John Cassavetes’ 1974 film A Woman Under the Influence, in which Gena Rowlands’ suburban housewife reaches breaking point. “And I thought: ‘Yes, that’s it! That’s what I want!’” she exclaims. “I wanted that level of freedom and inventiveness and presence and connection. It was so powerful to watch. That movie showed me what was possible.”
Maslany is now 36, and in the intervening years she has rarely stopped. Her career has taken her from Orphan Black, the sci-fi series about a group of clones where she played 11 roles at once (and received an Emmy for her efforts), to the Broadway production of Lee Hall’s Network, alongside Bryan Cranston, to the neo-noir film Destroyer, in which she was kidnapped by Nicole Kidman’s burnt-out detective.
