Tatiana Maslany

“Auditions are not a natural environment, and you feel judged, even though everyone is just excited to find the right person.”

“I'm at the transition place myself, still playing high school girls but moving to a stage when I'm playing older roles and going to the places of stillness and wisdom and knowledge and weight. It's exciting and scary.”

“Sometimes I'll go into a shop and speak in a different accent to see if I can pull it off. But then somebody will be like, 'Where did you say you were from again...?' And then I panic, and my accent dissolves, and I pretend like I wasn't doing it in the first place.”

“Comedy scares me a lot. I feel like it's way harder than drama. I think my safety net is definitely drama, and I would love to kind of be able to be able to push into the comedy world and do something kind of like a Christopher Guest kind of style show. That, to me, is my kind of comedy. Like, Ricky Gervais comedy. That's my kind of thing.”

“I started out as a dancer as a kid; I've been dancing since I was 4. So, performing was always part of what I was. I don't know if it I enjoyed the response I got from people or if I liked having an audience, but there's something in me that wanted to perform.”

“It's always been my dream to just continually do really cool indie movies - character-driven stuff.”

“I was on the improv team in high school, and after I graduated, I joined an improv company that had been established 10 years prior to me getting there. They did longform improv, and I fell in love with it. It's acting, character creation, collaborative, artistic expression and comedy - and it's scary. It was a big rush.”

“Robert de Niro has always been fascinating to me. And if John Cazale were still alive, that would be a man I'd love to work with. I'm a big fan of Paul Thomas Anderson's films - I would be honored to work with him. I think he's a brilliant director, and he gets such compelling stories out of his actors and out of his crew.”

“I grew up in Canada, man - we all had rinks in our backyards because we'd ice down the grass with a hose and build a skating rink.”

“I love people, watching people interact. It's a lot of psychology. We learn about ourselves by watching other people's lives on the screen.”

“My mom taught me German before I knew English. And I went to French immersion school.”

“Trust your gut. You know yourself, so don't let somebody else tell you who you are.”

“You're hot for two seconds, and you're struggling to get work again. If it were easy, I don't think that's a good place for an artist to work from.”

“I'm attracted to stories that excite my imagination, stories that, as I'm reading the script, I feel it, I can see it, I can hear the characters. I'm attracted to characters that are real, that tap into something inside me that I haven't explored yet.”

“As an actor, you're listening to the other person and always trying to be present and take everything they're giving you, but when they're not there, you have to produce that yourself.”

“'Orphan Black' allows for people to have debates and theories and allegiances to different characters - to trust characters and hate other characters - but it doesn't tell you who is good or bad or right or wrong. That's the most exciting storytelling, in my book.”

“There's something really unique about 'Orphan Black' is that it has a lot of female leads, so it's about a lot of women's stories, but it's not women's stories in terms of trying to find a guy or keep a guy; it's about entirely other things.”

“How you go about moving within the world you live in says so much about who you are.”

“I'm a huge 'Futurama' fan, so that's my closest sci-fi tendency.”

“I was a dancer from about the age of four, so I was always performing and forcing my parents to watch my brother and I do 'Jesus Christ Super Star' in the living room. My first step was community theater, and then I started to do films.”