Two of a Kind: Revaluing the Work of Acting Doubles in Orphan Black

prior to the launch of the second season of Orphan Black (2013–), BBC America released a series of promotional posters, each of which featured one of the clones played by Canadian actor Tatiana Maslany. Only the right side of Maslany’s face is visible in these posters, with the left superimposed by black fill and the slogan “One. Of a Kind.” As a promotional tool, these posters reflect the basic narrative premise of Orphan Black: the story of a group of women who discover they are part of a human cloning experiment. Yet the posters also have much to tell us about the question of performance in the series. Much of the critical praise lauded upon Orphan Black highlights Maslany’s extraordinary performance(s), focusing on the skill and effort needed to play multiple protagonists and to act opposite herself. Gawker’s Michelle Dean calls Maslany “the thing that takes the show to another level”; Emily Nussbaum’s review for the New Yorker states that “[i]f it weren’t for Tatiana Maslany . . . Orphan Black would be just a likable-enough thriller”; and Mary McNamara from the Los Angeles Times describes the show as “chockablock with clichés, predictable exposition . . . and some fairly whacked out plot twists” but concludes that “it doesn’t matter because Orphan Black isn’t so much about plot as it is performance.” The critical consensus seems to be that without Maslany, Orphan Black would be largely forgettable. As the key marker of quality for the series, Maslany’s performance in multiple roles is unsurprisingly foregrounded in the program’s promotional material.¹ Yet her body is only half-visible in the season 2 posters, suggesting that Maslany is only half of the picture, twinned with something unseen and yet indispensable. Indeed, exceptional as it may be, Maslany’s work as an actor is not entirely “one of a kind” but is always underscored and supported by the invisible labor of her body double, Kathryn Alexandre.

Alexandre acts opposite Maslany in scenes involving two or more clones, wearing the appropriate costume and wig and performing the lines, accents, and physical mannerisms of the clone in question. Once the scene is complete, the two swap, and the scene is performed again. Alexandre’s body is then digitally replaced in postproduction. Her work also includes more traditional body doubling, standing in for Maslany when her face is not required to be shown onscreen. Alexandre is usually described as Maslany’s “clone double,” a somewhat awkward tautology that points toward our terminological failure to properly account for her contribution to the series. Lili Loofbourow, writing for the New York Times, proclaims that the series “shows what a single actor can do when given the opportunity” (35). She describes Maslany’s work as magnetic, arguing that “you’re so engrossed by the dynamic developing between [the clones] that you barely notice you’ve just witnessed an extraordinary feat of engineering” (33). With this statement, Loofbourow paradoxically locates the strength of Maslany’s performance in terms of the relational dynamics between the clones—something that relies upon the presence and performance of Alexandre—but continues to see this as a measure of the work of the single actor. Much like Maslany’s missing half in the promotional posters, then, Alexandre’s work as an actor is constantly removed, as her face and body are digitally replaced by Maslany in the final broadcast version of the text. This effacement ensures that Alexandre’s invisibility extends not simply through the visible frame of the program, but also throughout the attention of critical discourse.

By bringing Alexandre’s performative work into focus, I seek to make an overdue intervention into theories of screen acting, which have almost exclusively understood performance as the product of a single individual. I trace Alexandre’s impact on the final text of Orphan Black through her high visibility in the behind-the-scenes paratexts and through her significant presence in the narratives that Maslany and other cast and crew members tell about their experience as workers on the production. In...