Tatiana Maslany

Orphan Black asked her to do something television almost never asks. Tatiana Maslany, born in Regina, Saskatchewan in 1985, played a set of characters who share a face across the series from 2013 to 2017, and the credit line here reads Sarah, Cosima, Alison and then trails off, which is roughly the experience of watching it. What makes it hold up is physical rather than vocal: each woman stands and moves differently, so scenes of her acting opposite herself never collapse into one performer doing voices.

It won her a Primetime Emmy in 2016 and five Canadian Screen Awards, and made her the first Canadian to win an Emmy in a major dramatic acting category for a Canadian series, which is a genuinely national piece of trivia rather than a press-release superlative. It also created a problem: how do you follow a role that was five roles?

The answer has been steady and slightly frustrating. She was excellent as Sister Alice McKeegan in Perry Mason, a preacher part with real strangeness in it, and she is the anchor of Stronger, playing Erin Hurley opposite a much showier lead role. Destroyer and Woman in Gold used her sparingly and well. She-Hulk: Attorney at Law handed her a Marvel lead and a comedy register she was clearly enjoying, in a series that never quite decided what it was. Her early credits, including horror like Diary of the Dead and The Messengers and a stint on Heartland, are the ordinary Canadian working-actor apprenticeship that the Orphan Black years obscured. The Monkey in 2025 and Star Trek: Starfleet Academy in 2026 keep her in genre, where she has always been most usefully employed.