Maslany plays every clone in Orphan Black, a series whose entire concept rests on the audience accepting that these are different people. She differentiates them through posture, rhythm and gaze rather than through accent alone, and the achievement extends to playing one clone impersonating another, which requires two layers of characterisation at once.
She is Canadian and came from improvisational theatre and Canadian television before the series, which was produced there on a modest budget. Her improvisational background is central to how she builds characters quickly, and she has spoken about developing each clone through physical work and posture before anything else.
Recurring subjects: identity as something performed, women whose bodies are treated as property by institutions, and technical performance in service of a genuine argument. She works with extraordinary physical precision, and her comic and dramatic registers are equally developed, which the series demanded of her episode by episode.
She won a major television award for the role after a widely publicised campaign about her earlier exclusion, and the performance is a standard reference in discussions of technical acting. The series demonstrated that a modestly budgeted genre production could compete on performance alone.
For viewers who want a technical performance that is also emotionally complete. Suited to anyone approaching the clone series, and to those interested in Canadian genre television made on a fraction of an American budget.
