STACK #130 Aug 2016

EXTRAS

Q&A

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one clone, he would be dressed as the other, and we would shoot it. The challenge was I had to remember what he was doing once we switched – we would shoot it, he would step out, I’d put in an earbud, there’d be tennis balls for eyelines, and I would act to the air and we would flip and do the whole process again. Thankfully the visual effects people would put it all together and make it look real, and fool even me! The first thing I did when I heard they were shooting the [season two finale] clone dance party was go and watch, and marvel at how she manoeuvred around it. Dealing with the technical craziness was the biggest challenge for me this season. So I watched her do it and tried to incorporate that into my performance. What was great for us was that now she had someone who was experiencing what she was experiencing – it really put me in a safe zone. It’s exhilarating and the greatest challenge in my acting career thus far; I doubt many projects that come my way will challenge me in the same way. It’s been a wild ride. 04/ How time consuming is it to shoot the clone scenes? The camera that they use for some of those special shots has been affectionately nicknamed “the time vampire”, so there were some long days [laughs]. Even if we were on point with getting our shots, what’s fantastic about the show and the directors we get is that they come up with creative ways to shoot those scenes – the clone dance party is probably the best example of that. I think it took three days. 03/ DidTatiana Maslany give you some helpful advice? 05/ What else can we expect to see in SeasonThree? What Clone Club can really look forward to is Project Castor is really going to help Project Leda sort of tighten up and pull together and see what’s really important in the greater scheme of things. For the last two seasons we’ve been asking a lot of questions and the world is getting bigger. Now, in the third season, I think Clone Club can look forward to getting answers to some of those questions. More questions will be asked, and there’s going to be some really great payoff in this season. I think Clone Club is really going to love where we’re taking them.  

Orphan Black: Season Three is out now on DVD & Blu-ray

Orphan Black star Ari Millen was literally beside himself in the third season of the cult sci-fi series. He tells Scott Hocking about the challenge of playing a cloned character, and what we can expect in SeasonThree. BACK IN BLACK

01/ Did you know you’d be coming back as a clone prior to the end of season two, and how many roles will you be playing in the third season? ARI MILLER: They kept their cards pretty close to their chest – they let me know about two weeks before we shot the big cliffhanger reveal of season two. We know of four [characters] right now that I can talk about. We know that they are self-aware. They grew up in a tight knit, secret military wing, trained together and formed a cohesive, brutal wolf pack to do the military’s worst bidding. Coming into this season, we’re discovering that they need something from Project Leda and they

have a lot more intel on Project Leda than Leda knows about them. So things will become more difficult now they’ve got hold of Helena. 02/ What’s the biggest challenge of playing multiple characters from a performance perspective? It’s so complicated; it’s hard to explain, even though I was there [laughs]. A layman’s description would be, I have a fantastic clone double named Nick Abraham – we would read the scene that has two Castor clones in it, then we would discuss what we wanted to get across, and then we would talk with the director and block it. So I would be dressed as

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AUGUST 2015 JB Hi-Fi www.jbhifi.com.au