Key Change: Tatiana Maslany on "Faceshopping" by Sophie

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. And right now, she’s starring in the show Maximum Pleasure Guaranteed on AppleTV. When Tatiana prepares for her roles—and the roles within the roles—she often uses music to inspire and motivate her. Today, I got to talk to Tatiana about a song that’s been really important to her and her process. And that song is “Faceshopping” 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. In 2018, she released her breakthrough Grammy-nominated album, Oil of Every Pearl’s Un-Insides, which dealt a lot with her trans identity. And that’s the album that has the song “Faceshopping.” For more info, visit songexploder.net/tatiana-maslany. https://songexploder.net/tatiana-maslany

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Hrishikesh Hirway?

  You'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 Rishi Kesh Hirway.

• 0:11Hrishikesh Hirway?

  I'm going to be on tour, playing some shows this fall. I'm going to be in London on Wednesday, November 18. I'm going to be performing solo at Rough Trade Records on Denmark Street, and I'm going to be in conversation about my music moderated by one of my favorite actors and writers, Matthew Bainton. And a ticket to the show also gets you a copy of my album on vinyl or CD. And in December, I'm going to be on tour supporting S. Carry. We're going to be playing a bunch of shows in the Northeast US. So I hope to see you in one of those places. You can find all the details and get links to tickets at songexploder.net/live. That's songexploder.net/live.

• 0:55Hrishikesh Hirway?

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• 1:39Hrishikesh Hirway?

  New episodes are coming out every other Tuesday. Listen to Before the Moment with Nile Rodgers wherever you get your podcasts.

• 1:47Speaker 01

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• 2:19Hrishikesh Hirway?

  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. And 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.

• 3:04Hrishikesh Hirway?

  And that song is...

• 3:05Speaker 02

  "Face Shopping" by Sophie.

• 3:08Hrishikesh Hirway?

  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. In 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.

• 3:45Hrishikesh Hirway?

  When did you first hear this song?

• 3:47Speaker 02

  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, B.C., 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.

• 4:18Hrishikesh Hirway?

  Nice.

• 4:18Speaker 02

  Yeah. And we were driving back from dinner or something, and he played it in like the little Honda Civic that we were driving. And...

• 4:27Speaker 02

  The feeling I had was, oh, there I am. Like, that's me.

• 4:33Hrishikesh Hirway?

  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?

• 4:42Speaker 02

  We had very separate tastes, but we also would play around. Daniel was like always making music on the computer. And then we had like two microphones and Mikey was like a toddler for a lot of it. But we would like make him freestyle or whatever. You know, so we have a lot of recordings of us just playing around with music. And Daniel legit was making music and then we would like get on it and sort of just be goofy. But that was like a big thing for us.

• 5:10Hrishikesh Hirway?

  Had you been familiar with Sophie before that? Did you know the music in any kind of way?

• 5:15Speaker 02

  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?

• 5:39Hrishikesh Hirway?

  Yeah. Can you pinpoint anything about it that made you feel that way?

• 5:44Speaker 02

  I love beats so much and I love a sparse beat.

• 5:53Speaker 02

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

• 6:06Speaker 02

  Those 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 trope-y 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 like kind of a run of like singing. And I thought the song had changed.

• 6:42Speaker 02

  And then it came back.

• 6:49Speaker 02

  And there was something so rebellious about the structure of it. It leaves a lot of weird space in it.

• 6:57Hrishikesh Hirway?

  Yeah.

• 6:58Speaker 02

  For you to actually hear all of these kind of clangs and distorted sounds.

• 7:05Hrishikesh Hirway?

  Before that moment, had there ever been a song that you felt that way about?

• 7:08Speaker 02

  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 CNC Music Factory. Those are like, this is one of the touchstones. That's absolutely core to who I am. But 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.

• 7:52Hrishikesh Hirway?

  Will you listen to music before you go to film a scene or something like that? Do you like use to psych yourself up or get yourself into the right headspace?

• 7:59Speaker 02

  Yeah, I use it like for like rhythmic things too, like especially if I'm like trying to like delineate a character, it's like, what's the music in this person? And it doesn't have to be like logical, like I played a character who was like a preacher in the 1930s, but I listened to a lot of like the yeah, yeah, yeahs for her. Because I wanted this sort of raw, powerful, feminine showman thing. And something about Karen O is like that in a, you know what I mean? This kind of like a religious experience.

• 8:32Hrishikesh Hirway?

  With Orphan Black, because you were constantly playing, how many clones in the end were you playing? Five?

• 8:38Speaker 02

  No, it was like 12 or something, but some of them died very quickly.

• 8:42Hrishikesh Hirway?

  Yeah.

• 8:42Speaker 02

  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 and 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.

• 9:25Hrishikesh Hirway?

  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?

• 9:38Speaker 02

  Yeah, 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. Like, you're so lucky as an actor to be given that kind of thing. And I always wanted to play characters, but that was like the first time I really got to like attempt at character actor, you know, which is like the pinnacle for me.

• 10:09Hrishikesh Hirway?

  Well, I'm wondering then, were you still thinking about that path and like that theme when you started doing She Hulk?

• 10:17Speaker 02

  A hundred percent.

• 10:18Hrishikesh Hirway?

  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. Did it feel like that to you?

• 10:25Speaker 02

  Yeah, totally. Like, okay, so you're, 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. Like, all of these outside perceptions and how do we internalize that? Sophie was like some of my music for that because of the...

• 11:10Speaker 02

  The sounds of her felt like my transformations from Jennifer Walters into She-Hulk.

• 11:18Hrishikesh Hirway?

  My conversation with Tatiana Maslany continues after this.

• 11:25Hrishikesh Hirway?

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• 12:09Hrishikesh Hirway?

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• 13:34Hrishikesh Hirway?

  Even 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?

• 14:03Speaker 02

  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. I 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.

• 14:46Speaker 02

  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?

• 14:53Hrishikesh Hirway?

  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.

• 15:02Speaker 02

  Yeah, totally.

• 15:04Hrishikesh Hirway?

  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, Mike? 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? You know, when you're...

• 15:20Speaker 02

  Yeah. I'm pretty constantly like tapping. I don't really ever tap out. Like, I feel like I'm such an intense music listener that like, there's phases in my life where it's like, I was obsessed. Like, I just went through like 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. And like, like, it's really active. There's very rarely passive listening for me.

• 15:54Hrishikesh Hirway?

  I absolutely love finding a song that I love that I also know that my sister's gonna love.

• 15:59Speaker 02

  Uh huh.

• 15:59Hrishikesh Hirway?

  That I'm like, this is the best song and I know exactly who's gonna love this.

• 16:03Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 16:04Hrishikesh Hirway?

  When your brother played that in the car, do you feel like he already knew that it was gonna be something that you were gonna resonate with so strongly?

• 16:12Speaker 02

  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 gonna lose my mind because he knows exactly my taste. But 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, but for sure, for sure.

• 16:43Hrishikesh Hirway?

  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?

• 16:52Speaker 02

  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, like, she was like, so the favorite and 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.

• 17:37Speaker 02

  That world is very much the three of us. So yeah, so it was like, oof, it really.

• 17:45Speaker 02

  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.

• 17:56Hrishikesh Hirway?

  After Sophie passed away, did you find it harder to listen to her music? Or did you find yourself listening to her music more?

• 18:05Speaker 02

  I 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, but yeah, it was pretty intense there for a bit.

• 18:33Hrishikesh Hirway?

  I was wondering if the utility of that song, and the way that it helped you access parts of that, that performance, like, 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? Like, is face shopping still a part of your process? Or like, a big part of your life in this creative way?

• 18:55Speaker 02

  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, or discover something about it. But I don't think that one will ever really go away because it's so inventive.

• 19:11Hrishikesh Hirway?

  You're still finding stuff in it?

• 19:12Speaker 02

  Oh, totally. Even like, listening to it again for this. I was like, oh, I'm hearing something new. Like, I'm, I'm hearing a different something in the clang. There is 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? Like, what does this mean? Why did she do that? It's, yeah, it's like endlessly interesting.

• 19:38Hrishikesh Hirway?

  What is it about yourself, your personality or how you see yourself, that connects with the clangs?

• 19:48Speaker 02

  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 masculinity there. There's like, 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.

• 20:24Hrishikesh Hirway?

  That's so interesting because I think, you know, so many artists in all kinds of mediums want to be universally beloved.

• 20:35Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah.

• 20:35Hrishikesh Hirway?

  Right, like, the aspiration is, I'm doing my thing, but look, it just happens to be that everybody loves me for the thing that I do.

• 20:43Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 20:44Hrishikesh Hirway?

  But for you, the aspiration is to be specific to the point of being potentially off-putting for some people.

• 20:52Speaker 02

  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.

• 21:00Hrishikesh Hirway?

  I thought also interesting that those things go together, that like,

• 21:03Speaker 02

  Totally.

• 21:03Hrishikesh Hirway?

  acting as a kid means obedient.

• 21:06Speaker 02

  Well, 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.

• 21:33Hrishikesh Hirway?

  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?

• 21:48Speaker 02

  For 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.

• 22:16Speaker 02

  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. But then I also want to be free, as an artist, to find things in the moment that aren't necessarily prescribed. Or, 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.

• 23:02Hrishikesh Hirway?

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

• 23:16Hrishikesh Hirway?

  For more Key Change episodes, go to songexploder.net/kechange. This episode was produced by me, Craig Ely, and Mary Dolan, with production assistance from Tiger Biscuit. 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/shirt. I'm Rishi Kesh Hirway. Thanks for listening.