‘Orphan Black’ Gets Its First Emmy Nomination
For Tatiana Maslany, an Emmy nomination for best lead actress in a drama series for her clone series, Orphan Black, is a nod to the many varied roles she plays on the show. Considering, during the three seasons Orphan Black has aired, Maslany has played no less than 10 clones of herself, it is surprising she hasn’t been nominated before now.
In Orphan Black, Tatiana quite often has to act against herself when scenes involve multiple clones. In order to do this, the scenes are shot several times with Tatiana and her usual body double, Kathryn Alexandre. Hours of behind-the-scenes work then goes into amalgamating the scenes into the one fluid shot. A motion control camera called a Technodolly is used to make sure all the shots are replicated exactly.
On set, the Orphan Black cast refer to this device as the “Time Vampire” due to the vast amount of time it takes to shoot clone scenes. In the instance where a large amount of clones are present in a scene — take for example the season 3 finale of Orphan Black, where all the clones were having dinner together — it can take days just to film and then hundreds of hours on top of that to join stitch the scene together.
While Tatiana Maslany’s nomination for best lead actress is a nod to her talent, Maslany is humble and surprised she was nominated. During an interview with TVLine, she put her Orphan Black nomination down to being lucky enough to “squeeze” into a category.
“There’s so many amazing, amazing roles for women and so much talent. I have no qualms with never being nominated. I honestly never thought I deserved to be nominated. There’s so many performances out there that are amazing and groundbreaking. I feel like it’s such a really lucky time to be a woman in television. We’re given this new force and this new space. It’s just really exciting. I don’t think it was by any means a long time coming or anything. I just think, somehow, I squeezed in there. [Laughs] I squeezed in this amazing category with all these ridiculous talents.”
Tatiana also slept through the nomination announcement due to night shoots. She had finished up at 5 a.m. that day and was only awake because an alarm had gone off in her building prior to her phone ringing.
The list of nominees for Tatiana’s category of best lead actress in a drama are below:
LEAD ACTRESS, DRAMA
Taraji P. Henson, Empire
Claire Danes, Homeland
Viola Davis, How to Get Away with Murder
Tatiana Maslany, Orphan Black
Elisabeth Moss, Mad Men
Robin Wright, House of Cards
The full list of Emmy nominations can be found here.
Orphan Black will return next year for season 4 on BBC America. The cast recently appeared at San Diego Comic Con.
Are you excited to see Tatiana Maslany from Orphan Black nominated for an Emmy this year? Let us know by commenting below.
[Image credit: BBC America]
