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Tatiana Maslany On Looking Herself In The Eye

Tatiana Maslany plays Sarah, as well as some other characters, on BBC America's <em>Orphan Black</em>.
Steve Wilkie
/
BBC America
Tatiana Maslany plays Sarah, as well as some other characters, on BBC America's Orphan Black.

Tatiana Maslany plays Sarah — and some other people — on BBC America's sci-fi show Orphan Black. On Friday's Morning Edition, she speaks to Kelly McEvers about how she manages to play all those different women from different cultural backgrounds, not to mention women with different mixes of malevolence and likability. Technically, it's no picnic: Just ask the tennis ball that sometimes plays her head.

But it's not all about the technology: Maslany also talks about the discovery at the end of Orphan Black's first season that some of her characters may be, in a sense, someone else's property. "That always resonated for me as a woman to have this idea of our bodies not being our own," she says. "That they're owned by someone else. That the image of them is owned by someone else. I feel that's a very resonant theme for young women like myself, and especially women in this industry."

Orphan Black returns Saturday, April 19, at 9 p.m. ET.

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Linda Holmes is a pop culture correspondent for NPR and the host of Pop Culture Happy Hour. She began her professional life as an attorney. In time, however, her affection for writing, popular culture, and the online universe eclipsed her legal ambitions. She shoved her law degree in the back of the closet, gave its living room space to DVD sets of The Wire, and never looked back.
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