During the making of her new TV show, Tatiana Maslany felt unsure. It started during the audition process, and it was, essentially, the character’s fault. “I hadn’t been in an audition room for a very long time, and I was rusty and nervous because I felt like I didn’t know the character,” she says.
The role was the lead of Maximum Pleasure Guaranteed, a crime thriller that follows a newly-divorced mom who is managing a custody battle while also attempting to solve the murder of a camboy who had been blackmailing her. Maslany was intrigued by how much she was struggling to “put a finger on” the character of Paula, as well as the show’s mystery elements and the intense dynamics between Paula, her ex-husband (played by Jake Johnson) and his new wife (Barry’s Jessy Hodges). She was also excited about the chance to reunite with director David Gordon Green years after their collaboration on Stronger — and the fact that they were even doing auditions at all. “It’s wackadoo that we’re not doing real auditions anymore,” she says. “I think self-tapes make people so self-conscious. They need to be able to be fearless and unencumbered and not worried about what their face looks like — that’s the whole fucking job.”
