{"id":590855,"date":"2026-05-18T16:27:19","date_gmt":"2026-05-18T16:27:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/590855\/"},"modified":"2026-05-18T16:27:19","modified_gmt":"2026-05-18T16:27:19","slug":"tatiana-maslany-talks-about-new-tv-show-maximum-pleasure-guaranteed","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/590855\/","title":{"rendered":"Tatiana Maslany Talks About New TV Show Maximum Pleasure Guaranteed"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\tDuring the making of her new TV show, Tatiana Maslany<\/a> felt unsure. It started during the audition process, and it was, essentially, the character\u2019s fault. \u201cI hadn\u2019t been in an audition room for a very long time, and I was rusty and nervous because I felt like I didn\u2019t know the character,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n

\n\tThe role was the lead of Maximum Pleasure Guaranteed<\/a>, 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 \u201cput a finger on\u201d the character of Paula, as well as the show\u2019s mystery elements and the intense dynamics between Paula, her ex-husband (played by Jake Johnson) and his new wife (Barry\u2019s Jessy Hodges). She was also excited about the chance to reunite with director David Gordon Green years after their collaboration on Stronger \u2014\u00a0and the fact that they were even doing auditions at all. \u201cIt\u2019s wackadoo that we\u2019re not doing real auditions anymore,\u201d she says. \u201cI 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 \u2014\u00a0that\u2019s the whole fucking job.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tDespite getting the job, her confusion remained. \u201cI just kept thinking, who is Paula? It was a constant search for me all the way to episode 10,\u201d she says. \u201cBut she\u2019s asking herself that exact same question.\u201d<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\"\"<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\tMaslany in Maximum Pleasure Guaranteed.<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tCourtesy of Apple TV<\/p>\n

\n\tMaslany, who has been working in the industry for almost 25 years, says this sort of risk \u2014 a role that feels a little dangerous, on a project that is otherwise set up for success thanks to the backing of Apple TV<\/a> and veteran showrunners \u2014 is exactly what she\u2019s 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. \u201cI 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,\u201d she says. \u201cAnd they had stories about watching it with their parents or connecting with someone in Brazil about the show. It was really global.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tOrphan 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. \u201cI had heart palpitations after working on it,\u201d she says. \u201cI didn\u2019t sleep properly for years. We\u2019d start on Monday at 5:00 a.m., and by Friday we\u2019d be starting at 5:00 p.m. and going until 5:00 a.m. on Saturday morning. And then I\u2019d have to try and turn it around for the next week. It was unnecessarily exhausting.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tMany actors who start young have an embedded over-gratitude \u2014 they\u2019re so thankful to be working that they say yes to everything. That attitude, which she describes as \u201cTell me what you need me to do and I\u2019ll do it,\u201d 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\u2019s 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\u2019s better at advocating for herself on set and also makes a concerted effort to understand the experiences of every single worker in a production.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cYou get paid good money on big studio productions, but actors\u2019 contracts are a totally different thing than everybody else\u2019s and I have trouble talking about that because I feel like the double standard is so intense,\u201d she says. \u201cA lot of Marvel stuff is non-union for the crew, so any luxuries go only to the actors.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tShe has conversations about this with many of her fellow actors, about how to work in this field that\u2019s getting swallowed up by conglomerates without feeling like you\u2019re part of a larger system that you can\u2019t abide by. \u201cSo much is changing so quickly, and that\u2019s why things like \u2018the inevitability of AI\u2019 \u2014 I\u2019m putting that in quotes \u2014 are bullshit,\u201d she says. \u201cIt\u2019s not inevitable. It\u2019s a thing we\u2019re being as sold as, it\u2019s inevitable and it\u2019s coming for our jobs, and it doesn\u2019t have to. We don\u2019t have to succumb to that. We can advocate for real people, for labor law, for the rights of all workers.\u201d Now, Maslany gives extra attention to the way that any production operates, like whether they offer points on the backend to the entire crew.<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\"\"<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\tMaximum Pleasure Guaranteed<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tCourtesy of Apple TV<\/p>\n

\n\tWhen 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\u2019t 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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cI\u2019m not a mother, I don\u2019t know the in\u2019s and out\u2019s of it, so there\u2019s a sense of fraudulence when I\u2019m playing one,\u201d says Maslany. \u201cBut that also feels right for Paula. Everyone is like, are you fit to do this? There\u2019s a defensiveness and a clumsiness.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tThere was potential for some of the camboy scenes to feel clumsy, too, but the show\u2019s directors had a plan for that. They built two side-by-side sets, one for Paula\u2019s apartment and one for Trevor\u2019s, with cameras filming each of them as they acted on the web cam to each other. \u201cBrandon 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.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tWhen Maximum Pleasure Guaranteed premieres on May 20, Maslany hopes that audiences go on the same journey that she did. \u201cI don\u2019t know how people are going to read Paula, I don\u2019t know how they\u2019re going to feel and that\u2019s exciting,\u201d she says. \u201cMy hope is that by the end you\u2019re uncertain about Paula. That there are questions about her choices that are uncomfortable. She\u2019s reckless and impulsive and I love that.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"During the making of her new TV show, Tatiana Maslany felt unsure. It started during the audition process,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":590856,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[32],"tags":[9265,6491,96,202213,9079,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-590855","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-celebrities","tag-apple-tv","tag-celebrities","tag-entertainment","tag-maximum-pleasure-guaranteed","tag-tatiana-maslany","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/590855","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=590855"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/590855\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/590856"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=590855"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=590855"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=590855"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}