Key Change: Tatiana Maslany on "Faceshopping" by Sophie

0:00You're listening to Song Exploder, where musicians take apart their songs and piece by piece tell the story of how they were made. I'm Rishikesh Hirway. This episode is sponsored by the new video game Mixtape. It's sort of like if the movie Dazed and Confused were a video game. It's about high school and adventure and nostalgia. And if you're the kind of person who cares about the power of an amazing mixtape, then this game is probably for you. The soundtrack features Smashing Pumpkins, Iggy Pop, Suzy and the Banshees, Joy Division, The Cure, and a lot more. Mixtape comes out May 7th on console and PC.

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1:33That's q-u-i-n-c-e dot com slash songexploder for free shipping and 365 day returns. Quince.com slash songexploder. This is Key Change, where I talk to fascinating people about the music that changed their lives. And my guest today is the actor Tatiana Maslany. One of the things I find so compelling about Tatiana and her career is that the roles that she plays often contain multitudes, literally. She played over 10 different characters, clones, but with distinct personalities, in the TV show Orphan Black. And in the Marvel Universe, she played She-Hulk, who also had the very different alter ego of Jennifer Walters, a lawyer.

2:14And right now, she's starring in the show Maximum Pleasure Guaranteed on Apple TV. When Tatiana prepares for her roles, and the roles within the roles, she often uses music to inspire and motivate her. And so today, I got to talk to Tatiana about a song that's been really important to her and her process. And that song is... Face Shopping by Sophie. If you're not aware of Sophie's music, she was an incredible, groundbreaking electronic artist from the UK. She was trans, and she passed away far too young in 2021. But even in a short time, she made a big impact. In addition to her own music, she also produced tracks for Charli XCX and Madonna and more.

2:52In 2018, she released her breakthrough Grammy-nominated album, Oil of Every Pearl's Uninsides, which dealt a lot with her trans identity. And that's the album that has the song Face Shopping. Okay, here's my conversation about it with Tatiana Maslany.

3:11When did you first hear this song? So I'm terrible with dates, but it was years ago when it came out. My brother, Daniel, who is like most influential in my life in terms of music, he played it for me and my brother, Michael, when we were in Kelowna, BC, which is in Canada. We were there because Michael, my youngest brother, was at the time he's an animator and he was working out of Kelowna. And so Daniel and I were just visiting him. We were just like siblings finding each other across the country. Nice. Yeah. And we were driving back from dinner or something and he played it in like the little Honda Civic that we were driving.

3:52And the feeling I had was, oh, there I am. Like, that's me. What was it like for the three of you in terms of music? Like, would you listen to music together? Did you experience that stuff together? Did you have your own separate tastes? We had very separate tastes, but we also would play around. Daniel was always making music on the computer. And then we had two microphones and Mikey was a toddler for a lot of it, but we would make him freestyle or whatever. So we have a lot of recordings of us just playing around with music. And Daniel legit was making music and then we would get on it and sort of just be goofy.

4:34But that was a big thing for us. Had you been familiar with Sophie before that? Did you know the music in any kind of way? Yeah, a little bit of like her first EP, like Bip and stuff like that. And I was always like very drawn to it, but there was something about this stuff that was like, oh, this is like my girl. Like something about this really speaks to me. I played for people as like a, do you understand me? Do you know what I mean? Like this is a large part of me and can you get down with this. Yeah. Can you pinpoint anything about it that made you feel that way? I love beats so much and I love a sparse beat.

5:20Tonally, the clanking kind of industrial sounds with this like poppy femininity.

5:32those two colliding that to me felt like oh that's something I want to be able to do as an artist is like take something tropey or expected and like show you the sort of other thing underneath of it or like the way that we can play with that trope and there's like a break in the middle where there's kind of a run of singing, and I thought the song had changed.

6:09And then it came back.

6:16And there was something so rebellious about the structure of it. It leaves a lot of weird space in it Yeah. For you to actually hear all of these kind of clangs and distorted sounds. Before that moment, had there ever been a song that you felt that way about? Yeah, I mean, for sure. The Beastie Boys were really big for me. Or like Gangster's Paradise by Coolio. I was like, this is who I am. Musically, this is me. You know what I mean? There's a few of those. Or like Everybody Dance Now by C &C Music Factory. Those are like, those are some of the touchstones. That's absolutely core to who I am.

6:58But like on an identity level, something about Sophie was like, and still continues to be. She's like the musician that I talk about the most because I'm drawing the most from her creatively. Music for me has always been tied to my acting process and also just my internal fantasy life and that kind of thing. Will you listen to music before you go to film a scene or something like that? Do you use it to psych yourself up or get yourself into the right headspace? Yeah, I use it for rhythmic things too, especially if I'm trying to delineate a character. It's like, what's the music in this person?

7:36And it doesn't have to be logical. I played a character who was a preacher in the 1930s, but I listened to a lot of the yeah, yeah, yeahs for her because I wanted this sort of raw, powerful, feminine showman thing. and something about Karen O. It's like that in a, you know what I mean? This kind of like a religious experience. With Orphan Black, because you were constantly playing, how many clones in the end were you playing? Five? No, it was like 12 or something. But some of them died very quickly. Yeah. A lot of them were dead. And then sometimes the characters would play each other. So there was all this like overlap and all of this like mixing.

8:17And it's like the exploration of the potential of any one person to be myriad people. Like this sort of suburban housewife, but she's like the most murderous of all of them, you know? And like the freakiest sexually or whatever, or like the like serial killer who was like bred to be a serial killer, but truly has like the most empathy and the most heart. And especially when you have this sort of bit that it's like me playing all these characters. So we know that's already an artificial thing. and then we can just go on the ride. Do you think that these ideas about multiplicity and different representations, if you had not been in that show, would you have related so hard to that Sophie song?

9:05Yeah, I think that it like coincided with an awakening in me about who I wanted to be as an artist. Because, you know, like I always say this about Orphan Black, I'm like, Anybody who was given that opportunity would dive into it. You're so lucky as an actor to be given that kind of thing. And I always wanted to play characters, but that was the first time I really got to attempt at character actor, which is the pinnacle for me. Well, I'm wondering then, were you still thinking about that path and that theme when you started doing She-Hulk? A hundred percent. I thought it was so cool when I saw that you were playing that role because it felt like in some ways like an inversion of Orphan Black.

9:51Did it feel like that to you? Yeah, totally. Like, okay, so you're this body, your whole life, you're this body. And then something happens and now suddenly you're perceived a completely different way. And you have to walk into rooms and people respond to you differently because suddenly you're taking up this much space or suddenly you can't be ignored or whatever it is. Like, your body is telling me everything I need to know about you. This is from the outside. So I'm going to treat you a certain way. I'm going to talk to you a certain way. I'm going to respect you or I'm going to be threatened by you or I'm going to fetishize you or I'm going to ignore you or whatever.

10:27Like all of these outside perceptions and how do we internalize that? Sophie was like some of my music for that because of the sounds of her felt like my transformations from Jennifer Walters into She-Hulk. My conversation with Tatiana Maslany continues after this.

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13:57Even as you were describing the sort of Russian nesting doll of you playing a character who's then playing a character in Orphan Black, I was thinking about the idea of listening to music that you feel is so identifiably you as a conduit to perform as someone else, as a different character. Do you find that tapping into something that is very deeply yourself helps you become someone else? It depends. Sometimes I'm listening to music on set that is just to fill me up. And it doesn't have anything to do with necessarily like this helps me into this character. But it's more like this moves me as an artist and I feel tapped into my body and my emotional life.

14:44I have like a pretty vast interest in different kinds of music. And it doesn't matter that it's not, you know, right in line with the character. For like Orphan Black, I would listen to like The Streets and Dizzy Rascal and Prodigy for like one character. And then another would be like show tunes. And so there were like these parts of me that sort of flavored each of them. And I could like concentrate really hard on those. It's like that's the nut that breeds that character. You know what I mean? Totally. It's like your entirety is like the sun. And then each song is like a little magnifying lens and you get to focus a little beam in one direction.

15:26Yeah, totally. With such an intense reaction to the song, does like face shopping fall into a different category of listening for you than just sort of casual listening might? Do you put it on for fun or do you only put it on when you really need to tap into something or feel something? Yeah. I'm pretty constantly like tapping. I don't really ever tap out. I feel like I'm such an intense music listener that there's phases in my life where it's like I was obsessed. I just went through a three-year system of a down phase. Any chance I had to be by myself, I was listening to a full album, and I would get these feelings in my chest, and I would feel this thing in my body.

16:09And it's really active. There's very rarely passive listening for me. Yeah. I absolutely love finding a song that I love that I also know that my sister's going to love. And I'm like, this is the best song. And I know exactly who's going to love this. Yeah. When your brother played that in the car, do you feel like he already knew that it was going to be something that you were going to resonate with so strongly? Yes, for sure. For sure. He'll like share things specifically with me that I think he either loves and he's like, I want you to know about this. or he knows that I'm going to lose my mind because he knows exactly my taste.

16:51But he said that when I was shocked at the change in that song, he said he was proud. So it was like, almost like he made the song. Do you know what I mean? Like he's proud of the fact that I was surprised. And like, I don't know how to, what to say about that, but for sure, for sure. So like after you had that reaction, especially, and since it became such an important part of your process and all that, have you talked about that with your brothers? Yeah. So what that's making me think of is Sophie died in 2021. And my brother called me that morning. We were both devastated. Like, she was like, so the favorite.

17:34And it was just so shocking. She's so young. And our Oma died that afternoon. So it was this very intense, strange, surreal day of like, yeah, it was very weird. And part of that is like the connection that I have to my brothers through that music and through the Sophie influenced musicians. That world is very much the three of us. So yeah, so it was like, oof, it really, yeah, it meant so much. She meant so much. And that kind of music means so much to us. So yeah, it's like we talk about that a lot. Yeah. After Sophie passed away, did you find it harder to listen to her music? Or did you find yourself listening to her music more?

18:29I listened to her every day for like three years after that. Like every day I was listening to her. And I don't know what that was, some like processing of it, but also just like celebrating of this beautiful stuff that she made and trying to like understand what happened or something. But yeah, I did listen to her a lot. And since then I've come back to her constantly, but yeah, it was pretty intense there for a bit. I was wondering if the utility of that song and the way that it helped you access parts of that performance, do you think that that's still something you could get from it as you have continued with other roles and you have this new show?

19:12Is face shopping still a part of your process or a big part of your life in this creative way? Yeah, I think I can, you know, take a little bit of time away from a song and come back to it and like hear something new or feel that thing again or discover something about it. But I don't think that one will ever really go away because it's so inventive. You're still finding stuff in it? Oh, totally. Even like listening to it again for this. I was like, oh, I'm hearing something new. Like I'm hearing a different something in the clang. There's a clang in there that I haven't heard before. Or like really listening to that weird gear shift and being like, what is this?

19:55Like, what does this mean? Why did she do that? It's, yeah, it's like endlessly interesting. What is it about yourself, your personality or how you see yourself that connects with the clangs? It's a level of intensity that I feel and it sort of matches like my anxiety or like my drive somehow. It also feels like the dream of who I could be. Like there's a hardness, there's a strength, there's like a masculinity there. There's something that makes people go like, ooh, I've never heard that before. Or like, maybe not everybody's cup of tea. Or maybe too harsh for some people. And that to me is kind of, like, that's sort of exciting.

20:47That's so interesting. Because I think, you know, so many artists in all kinds of mediums want to be universally beloved. Yeah, yeah. Right? Like the aspiration is, I'm doing my thing. But look, it just happens to be that everybody loves me for everything that I do. Yeah. But for you, the aspiration is to be specific to the point of being potentially off-putting for some people. That's the dream. And, you know, I started acting when I was like a kid, so I'm very good at being like obedient and like palatable. I felt also interesting that those things go together, that like acting as a kid means obedient.

21:29Well, because you sort of have, like for me at least, to get the director to be like, good job, you do what the director says. or whatever. And I'm not saying I would be like, I'm resistant to direction. It's more like to be a feral creature, actor, artist that isn't afraid to be embarrassing or ugly or confusing or yeah, like not everybody's cup of tea. When you were a kid and you were, you know, trying to get the director to say good job, do you feel like those experiences ended up bleeding into your non-acting life. And so you like took that kind of, let me make sure I'm doing a good job way of being into the rest of the world.

22:11For sure. I mean, I was like, can I be the best student? Can I be the best, you know, like, and to be like lauded for something by adults when you're that little is like very kind of like, oh, I guess that's my worth is like my skill or my talent or my ability to do that, blah, blah, you know, whatever. And I think it's like something that is at odds with being a free actor. It gets you to work on time. It makes you respect everybody. You know what I mean? Like there's a lot of wonderful things about it. I have a lot of respect for like all parts of a production, all parts of what comes together to make something happen.

22:56But then I also want to be free as an artist to find things in the moment that aren't necessarily prescribed. Yeah, I think the artistic impulse is not obedient. And I don't mean that in terms of like respectful. I mean like obedient in the terms of thinking within the box. I just think that no one's artistic impulse is that.

23:25Tatiana Maslany stars in the new show, Maximum Pleasure Guaranteed, which is out now on Apple TV. You can find her on Instagram at Tatiana Maslany.

23:39For more Key Change episodes, go to songexploder.net slash keychange. This episode was produced by me, Craig Ely, and Mary Dolan, with production assistance from Tiger Biscop. Song Exploder is a proud member of Radiotopia from PRX, a network of independent, listener-supported, artist-owned podcasts. You can learn more about our shows at radiotopia.fm. If you'd like to hear more from me, you can subscribe to my newsletter. You can find a link to it on the Song Exploder website. You can also get a Song Exploder shirt at songexploder.net slash shirt. I'm Rishikesh Hiraway. Thanks for listening.

24:22Radiotopia from PRX.