Tatiana Maslany on Maternal Double Standards, Bad Decisions, and Maximum Pleasure Guaranteed
Tatiana Maslany knows Paula makes terrible decisions. That’s half the fun.
In Apple TV’s Maximum Pleasure Guaranteed, Maslany plays a newly divorced mother whose attempt to find a little late-night companionship sends her into a mess involving blackmail, murder, internet sleuthing, and a hockey stick brought somewhere no hockey stick should reasonably go. Paula is smart enough to know better and impulsive enough to make sure the series keeps happening.
“I wanted to play her with all of the freedom that I could,” Maslany says. “I didn’t know where she landed. I didn’t know where she was at.”
That uncertainty became the engine of the performance. Paula is exhausted, driven, ashamed, curious, and liable to charge directly into danger before her common sense has finished putting on its shoes. “I wanted to have a real breadth of emotional volatility and unpredictability,” Maslany explains. “I think that’s the word that I would use, unpredictable.”
It’s also how Paula’s ex-husband and his new partner see her. She makes choices that haven’t exactly survived a committee review, then has to live with the consequences while everyone around her treats those choices as proof that they were right about her all along.
Maslany didn’t try to defend every decision Paula makes. “I question all of it,” she says. “That’s what I love about her. I’m like, why would she do that when she knows that she’s supposed to stay home and be responsible, and she’s out at a murderer’s house with a hockey stick?”
The answer is the same one that has propelled thrillers since somebody first heard a suspicious noise upstairs. Sensible people survive, but they rarely get eight episodes. “You don’t get a story if you don’t go up the stairs,” Maslany says. “You don’t have a movie about you if you’re not going to go up the stairs.”
Paula’s behavior may keep the plot moving, but Maslany sees something more pointed beneath all the amateur detective work. The series is less interested in issuing a grand statement about true crime or online sex work than in examining who gets punished for wanting something. “Paula has lost everything, and she’s starting at zero,” Maslany says. “She’s rebuilding her life, and she’s also just trying to pursue some pleasure for herself.”
That pleasure is quickly entered into evidence against her. Her interest in a cam boy becomes another reason to question her judgment, her stability, and her fitness as a mother. Meanwhile, the men around her are granted considerably more room to pursue what they want without having their entire character placed on trial. “I think the way that pleasure gets turned against her, and that it somehow makes her unfit as a mother or as a person, is more something I’m curious about,” Maslany says. “What are our expectations on a mother versus on a father?”
A father’s desire can be accepted as part of the natural order. Paula looks for a little fun online and suddenly society reconvenes the Salem witch trials. “Paula’s like, ‘I’m just gonna have some fun with this cam boy,’ and everybody’s like, ‘You’re terrible,’” Maslany says. “It’s just an interesting dynamic.”
The season’s final turn makes Paula even harder to pin down, raising questions about how much of her past was accidental, how much was deliberate, and whether the person viewers have trusted is the person they thought they knew.
That ambiguity suits Maslany just fine. Paula goes up the stairs, hockey stick in hand, because good judgment is useful in life. On television, it’s mostly a cancellation notice.
Watch the full interview above and then check out the trailer below.