Tatiana Maslany attends the Los Angeles Premiere of The Monkey in Los Angeles, on Feb. 13.Leon Bennett/Getty Images
Tatiana Maslany has a problem with being cool. We’re not talking about her attitude or the way she moves through life but acting: How it’s become more about striking poses and curating vibes than giving big performances and tapping into visceral emotions.
“I don’t know if you feel this watching films or TV,” Maslany wonders. “There’s sometimes an embarrassment around that kind of transformative acting. There’s a real ‘mumble it off’ as opposed to … “
She trails off, searching for the right words, but if you’ve seen Maslany’s work, it may be clear what she’s talking about: her dazzling chameleonic performances playing clones fighting for survival in Orphan Black, where Maslany acted opposite herself. Or those passionate feelings she taps into and lets loose in movies like Stronger and Destroyer. These are the kinds of theatrical performances you wouldn’t see in, say, the latest franchise movie. Think, for instance, how many times you’ve seen a superhero shed a tear, let alone ugly cry. It’s those performances that risk being decidedly uncool.
Maslany felt no such inhibitions in The Monkey, the latest from Longlegs director Osgood “Oz” Perkins. She plays an imposing matriarch with old Hollywood flair while absorbing the overall tone of the absurdist horror comedy. “He casts you to be the weirdo that you are,” Maslany says of Perkins, her collaborator not just on The Monkey but also their upcoming horror thriller Keeper, where both the aesthetics and the performances channel the past.
“You watch movies from the 70s, 80s, 90s, performances are huge,” says Maslany, who throughout her career has repeated how much she’s been inspired by the late screen icon Gena Rowlands. “Her performances: enormous, making faces that you would never make onscreen now because it’s ‘too big’ or ‘looks fake.’ It doesn’t. But the note that we often get is: ‘bring it down a bit.’”
The Monkey, Osgood Perkins’s bloody follow-up to Longlegs, is bananas for all the wrong reasons
Over Arabic lattes at Liberty Coffee Bar in Toronto, Maslany recalls times in her career that left her held back or placed in a box she just didn’t belong in. She’s not just talking about acting but also when speaking up – as she has for workplace safety and equity, for LGBTQ2S+ communities and for Palestinian lives – instances where she felt she had to exert her voice despite the limitations performers can face when going off-script.
The Monkey, in theatres Feb. 21, adapts Stephen King’s short story about twin brothers desperately trying to control death but growing to understand its chaotic randomness whenever someone winds up with their cursed, murderous toy monkey. Maslany gives a larger-than-life performance as their mother, a haunting figure coping with the disappearance of her husband, preparing her sons for life’s harsh realities.
This film feels even more intimate and personal than Longlegs, in which an overbearing mother harbors a secret from her child as a form of protection that also causes harm. Perkins is the son of Psycho star Anthony Perkins (his most famous movie also featuring an overbearing mother). The older Perkins lived his life in the closet and died from AIDS-related complications in 1992. Perkins’s mother, Berry Berenson, the model and actress, hid her husband’s sexuality from her children. She later died as a passenger on American Airlines Flight 11 during the 9/11 attacks. The traumas from these experiences seem to live beneath the surface in The Monkey.
“He did say, ‘you’re playing my mom,’” says Maslany. “He didn’t mince words.”
She mulls the thematic connections between Perkins’s recent films, like Longlegs, where Maika Monroe played a detective chasing down a demonic killer, The Monkey and the upcoming Keeper. “Tonally the three films are very different,” she says. But, she adds: “There’s horror in all of them. There’s inherited traumas that play out in all of them.”
Maslany is in Toronto shooting Starfleet Academy, an upcoming Star Trek series that has her returning to franchise fare, even though her last experience came with heavy cultural baggage. Her star turn on on Marvel’s She-Hulk: Attorney at Law was on the receiving end of misogynist online trolling, a response that was so predictable that creator Jennifer Gao even built it into the fourth-wall breaking series, especially in its finale, when Maslany’s Amazonian heroine confronts those critical of the show’s “feminist agenda,” as a certain online contingent would say.
She was drawn to the built-in awareness of what it means to have a female superhero as the lead. Her lawyer character isn’t just defending her clients but also herself, facing the scrutiny of an outside gaze and justifying her existence in the Marvel universe.
But Maslany also felt the burden of that gaze. She recalls makeup tests for She-Hulk, where she would spend 90 minutes in a chair trying on fake lashes and contouring, all to just achieve a girl-next-door look. “I wasn’t super healthy on that show because of that scrutiny.”
Maslany brings up the contrast between the She-Hulk experience and working with Perkins on Keeper, the first film they shot together. “I remember feeling my age in my face and enjoying it, and feeling like I didn’t have to carry an idea of beauty.”
With both The Monkey and Keeper, it’s fair to say Maslany is in a horror phase. She’s also been developing a queer dance horror movie called Next In Line. While this hasn’t been deliberate, she says her movie choices are “a response to feeling powerless in the face of so much horror, and embodying those feelings.”
Maslany addressed some of that horror head on last summer, when she was being honoured in her hometown during a Canada’s Walk of Fame ceremony. She highlighted the work being done in Saskatchewan’s Lulu’s Lodge, a support centre for LGBTSQ2S+ youth, and then turned her attention to Gaza. “We are witnessing the genocide of the Palestinian people,” she said tearfully, calling on Canada’s government to stop supporting the war.
Maslany says she was anxious about speaking out then, and still is now: As a public figure, there can be consequences to taking sides. “I have a lot of privilege in this because I have a career,” she says. “I’m a white person. I’m cisgender. I have a lot of things that keep me protected if I’m going to speak out. There are people who, if they did, would lose a lot quicker than me.”
“I guess you don’t know the jobs that you don’t get,” Maslany continues, unfazed. “If people don’t want to work with me, I don’t want to work with them.”
On the flip side, she says the experience has led to finding a sense of genuine community. “It’s keyed me into the people who have been doing this work forever,” she says. She describes similar positive takeaways from her experience on She-Hulk – meeting people on-set who had the same “openness and desire to care” about the thing they make – and The Monkey – becoming part of Perkins’s collective. Starfleet Academy, meanwhile, is a huge show that feels “super intimate” because the set is very loving and familial.
“Also, just acting in something where it’s like, you can act,” says Maslany. “It’s not about being cool.”
