‘Maximum Pleasure Guaranteed’s Tatiana Maslany Reveals the “Horror” Episode 4 Unleashes on Paula

Editor’s Note: The following contains spoilers for Episode 4 of Maximum Pleasure Guaranteed

Tatiana Maslany‘s Paula in Maximum Pleasure Guaranteed is really going through, well, a lot. Created by David Rosen, Apple TV’s comedic thriller sees the newly-divorced soccer mom doing her best to keep her perpetually chaotic and messy life in check as much as she possibly can — only to have a completely unexpected blackmail-murder scandal upend everything. Could her once-trusted Cam Boy Trevor (Brandon Flynn) really be behind all of this? And will her nosey, judgy co-workers (Charlie Hall and Kiarra Hamagami Goldberg) actually prove to be… helpful?

Those are just two of the many questions in desperate need of answers in the addictive Apple TV show, with Episode 4 of the freshman series peeling back some key layers to Karl (Jake Johnson) and his wife Mallory (Jessy Hodges) that provide some much-needed context to Paula’s previous marriage, while also raising even more questions about what happened years ago in Portland with the police and Paula.

Episode 4 feels a lot like a bottle episode, as the main narrative is briefly paused in order for us to see the exact moment things started to really shift in Paula and Karl’s marriage. But if there’s anyone up for the challenge of pulling off such a complex, charming, and engaging performance needed to anchor such a twisted series, it’s the endlessly impressive Tatiana Maslany. During this interview with Collider, the Orphan Black and She-Hulk star dissects what makes Paula such a magnetic character, why Paula decides to trust Rudy and Geri, and how Episode 4 challenges the narrative we’ve seen so far.

Tatiana Maslany Was Drawn to ‘Maximum Pleasure Guaranteed’s Unpredictability

“Paula was a question mark for me.”

Image via Apple TV

COLLIDER: You’re fantastic in this show and such a great anchor and lead. I want to start with a little bit of a fun question. Obviously, Paula has an outlet for pleasure, as we see. Is there something that you watch or that you do that immediately will turn your mood around?

TATIANA MASLANY: Yes. Going dancing, even if it’s by myself. But dancing is for sure. I don’t think there’s anything that I… Oh, you know what? I just watched Love on the Spectrum, and that did it for me for sure.

Good choices. What’s so great about Maximum Pleasure Guaranteed is that you’re able to be so funny and have such great line deliveries, and then you can immediately just be an emotional mess and really intense. What was your first impression when you were pitched the series and read the first script?

MASLANY: That, for me, was the delight in it. I couldn’t put my finger on the genre or the tone, and I consistently was asking David Rosen and David Gordon Green, “Is there anything that you kind of compare it to?” And they were like, “Kind of this, kind of that.” But it felt like it was its own creation in a lot of ways. The thing that I loved — I felt it in reading it, but I really felt it in doing it — was that each scene had so much potential. The writers are so fantastic. Within all the scenes, there is humor, there’s a kind of brutality, there’s pain, there’s lightness, there’s all these possibilities. And that, just as an actor, is a real exciting thing to get to try to do, and with all these actors who are so spontaneous and open and have comedic timing and also dramatic chops, it was really fun. I felt like Paula was a question mark for me. I didn’t know her, and I couldn’t place her. I felt like she was at a place where she didn’t know who she was, so it was just an incredibly powerful, visceral read when I read it.

Do you have a process for any project when you start to get into a character? Did it differ at all for this one?

MASLANY: Yeah, it differs for every project. I used to have quite a studious thing, but now I sort of try to follow what my instinct is. Sometimes it’s doing a lot of research, it’s reading books, it’s fiction, it’s whatever, it’s movement, it’s study of some kind. But for Paula, it was really like being present with everything that I was feeling when I was reading the script. Just like with the moment in my life — I was about to turn 40 — there was a sense of, “What is it to be at this age, and you don’t know who you are?” The heartbreak of the grief of that and the feeling of being a kid still when you’re thrust into this really adult world of divorces and of exes and of all that stuff like it. The process was a little nebulous and hard to place.

Creating Paula and Hazel’s Bond in ‘Maximum Pleasure Guaranteed’ Was Easy for Maslany

“Both of us have that sense of play.”

Image via Apple TV

Paula is hard to play, so that makes sense. Probably my favorite part of the show are your scenes with Hazel. Paula and Hazel’s relationship is so beautiful. I really felt like I was spying on a real mother-daughter duo. It was so authentic. What was that energy like on set?

MASLANY: [Nola Wallace] is so great. And from the start, she was so great. I think the first thing we shot was just me sending her off to school, and she was listening in every moment. I like to do everything different every single time, and when you’re working with an actor, they’ll respond differently, or they’ll give you something different. She’s no exception. She would improvise lines, she would try different things. If I changed something, she would totally respond to how I was doing it differently. Both of us have a sense of play. We could really find that thing in Paula and Hazel that is like their united thing, which is goofiness and ease with each other. That kind of thing felt very natural for Nola and I.

It seemed so natural, and it was really fun to watch. And heartbreaking at times, of course.

‘Maximum Pleasure Guaranteed’ Episode 4 Reveals Different Sides to Our Core Characters

“We see this other thing in Paula that’s reckless.”

I want to talk about Episode 4 a little bit. I like when shows take a step back and zoom out. We get different POVs of characters that we thought we knew. It was a really hard episode for Paula, because we start to see why her marriage started to crumble, and I now view Mallory differently and Karl differently. What stood out to you about that episode in particular? Did you feel like Paula was a different character?

MASLANY: Yeah. I think a lot of Paula at that point in her life is sleepwalking, in a way. She’s sort of become very comfortable with just everything as-is. She doesn’t really see what’s happening, even though she does see what’s happening. I think she also has a lot of rage. I think that rage is easy to dance on top of when you’re sort of laughing and joking, and you’re not really present in your own life. As soon as this sort of stuff is happening with Mallory, and we see this other thing in Paula that’s reckless. I think what’s cool about Episode 4. It has all of these twists and turns, but they’re just interpersonal and they’re just sort of inside of Paula’s experience. We can side with her and sort of feel empathy for her and sort of horror that her husband is clearly cheating on her or maybe cheating on her. By the end, I think that there’s a real question around Paula’s culpability and her volitional actions and whether she is operating with a lot of awareness or not. I think what it does really beautifully is add this other layer to Paula. We’ve sort of been following her story for the whole series, and now we’re given this extra thing that sort of challenges what we know about her and what we feel about her.

New York City is kind of its own character in the show. I know that David Rosen grew up there and lived there a while and put a lot of thought into New York City itself. What was it like approaching New York City as its own character?

MASLANY: I feel like New York City is like the most working city on the planet in terms of its ability to be a separate piece of a movie that is so vital to everything about that movie and the story and the history and everything. For me as a Canadian [Laughs] it’s like such a city. It’s the city, you know what I mean? It was very fun to be in areas that aren’t what you would see glamorized or romanticized about the city. More just neighborhoods and day-to-day stuff. We shot in every area, we were all over the place. Sometimes, two or three times a day, we’d be shifting whole locations with the unit move and everything. It was a very “alive” feeling. I’d only shot two separate films there and one day on each of those films, so this was the longest I’d been filming there. It’s totally its own beast.

It felt like that. I can feel the show being chaotic. It really felt like New York City is a perfect chaotic setting.

MASLANY: Yeah. Yeah, totally.

I also really loved your scenes with Charlie Hall and Kiarra Hamagami Goldberg. It was so interesting because, at the beginning, you feel like they’re just going to be these antagonists for her that just get in her way and provide laughs, but then they really become a huge part of the plot. What was it like filming those scenes with them in the office? It felt like there was a lot of improv.

MASLANY: Yeah, there’s improv. There’s also a lot that is tightly scripted, but just feels playful because Rosen and all the writers are such incredible writers. Charlie and Kiarra have such a specific dynamic, and for Paula, she does see them as sort of this nuisance for most of the beginning of the series, and then she has nowhere else to turn, she turns to these two people who, by all accounts, are, again, the incorrect people to go to with any of these problems that she’s having. But they’re sort of unbiased, and they’re neutral, in a way. They’re not wrapped up, they don’t know anything about her. She can kind of start from scratch with them and introduce them to who she is in this very intimate way that sometimes we can only do with strangers. It makes sense to me that they would be the kind of people she would approach because she had such an intimate relationship with a Cam Boy, who is being paid to be intimate with her, but who she totally feels real intimacy with. Paula doesn’t necessarily have the soundest of radars, but she always makes an interesting choice.

Maximum Pleasure Guaranteed airs Wednesdays on Apple TV.