'Orphan Black: The Next Chapter': Tatiana Maslany teases new clones and the fate of old characters 8 years down the line
Fans of 'Orphan Black' are getting yet another chance to relive their favorite show in audio and e-book format, complete with the star of the series, Tatiana Maslany, returning as the narrator. In the series, we hear her become an omniscient narrator, almost like a homage to the fact the clones are monitored, and their lives are more or less a science experiment.
Picking things up 8 years after the end of the events seen in season 5 episode 10, Maslany sheds the physical side of her acting to bring these characters to life with just her voice. As fans of the show would remember, every character we met on the show had a distinct personality, which was expressed with a combination of visual appearance, accents, dialogue delivery and so on.
It is her vocal skills that Maslany gets to truly rely on with 'Orphan Black: The Next Chapter.' "The Clones in the series also had different voices, different accents, but also different registers speaking different ways that they communicated depending on where they were from and also how they been raised so that that stuff has really come into play in the work I did. Vocally, in the series, it has just been amplified and kind of distilled," Maslany tells MEA WorldWide (MEAWW).
That is not to say that she does not fall back on the mannerisms of the various clones she embodied on the show, even while recording the audio. She says how from Allison's rigidity to Sarah's slump, these mannerisms helped her look into her own body to find out where the clone lived. However, the experience is still very different.
Maslany, who reinstates of the joy of revisiting this story, elaborates on how the audiobook format feels very contained and requires "a quiet creativity that you don't have when you're on set and there are a thousand people everywhere," She is happy to have this "very, very creative" experience that took her back to the basics and made her feel like a kid "reading a book and you're acting out all the characters.
The storylines, Maslany explains, fit beautifully within the world of the show that we love, and is a "nice extension of what we made with the show." She also looks at 'Orphan Black: The Next Chapter' as a "really nice way to give" the loyal fans "some more story to follow and more content." Last we saw them, the clones were seeking to cure the remaining clones that hadn't been given the inoculation against the genetic disease that they had.
In the 10 years that have passed by, everyone's been living their lives and continuing to deal with the problems of their day-to-day, but also, of being clones, with the threat of being discovered still hanging over them. Maslany explains, "They never will have normal lives... So, when we pick up with them, we see how they've continued to navigate that, and they're forced out into the public in a way that is kind of unexpected and unwanted by many of them. So, we definitely get to see them... or hear them go through that."
In the audiobook, she teases, we will also get a glimpse of Charlotte and Kira's friendship and their lives, how they've managed to survive the way that they've been brought up, and how its affected them, and how they are breaking out and becoming their own people because they're now in their early teens. "I really enjoy their storylines and seeing where they have come to, because they were also sort of outsiders within the Clone group, not entirely as the same bracket as the rest. So, it's kind of fun to see how that's impacted them differently," she says.
Among the new characters that we are introduced to, right off the back is Vivi Valdez, who has had experiences with other kids who looked identical to her. However, those experiences have been reformatted by her family and therapist to be imaginary friends. When she starts to become more self-aware of the clone and realizes that there are women out there who look identical to her, she starts to rethink the belief system that she grew up with.
'Orphan Black: The Next Chapter' is definitely promising to be a great experience for the OG fans, so don't forget to watch the Serial Box series on September 9. The full season will be available for $9.99 through 9/19, after which it will go up to $12.99.