When Krysten Ritter first read the pilot script for Orphan Black: Echoes, she knew that she would not be playing multiple clones on the new AMC series — and she felt good about that. “I think that would be just nuts,” she tells Consequence with a laugh. “What Tatiana Maslany did was so beautiful and so flawless and so on another level, I’m not trying to do that.”
Instead, Ritter signed up happily for the role of Lucy, a woman living in the not-too-distant future with no memory of her life before waking up in a strange waiting room with a mysterious doctor (Keeley Hawes) — because she’s a “printout” of another woman, whose identity she doesn’t know. That’s where the series begins, as Lucy seeks out answers as to who she is, finding an unlikely ally in another printout of herself, this one born as a teenager (Amanda Fix).
The different-yet-similar sci-fi premise comes from creator Anna Fishko, who developed the idea after learning that Orphan Black production company Boat Rocker Studios, in their search for a spinoff, “very specifically did not want to do biological clones again. They didn’t want to do one actress playing 18 different versions of herself.”
For one thing, Fishko explains, there was the legacy of Tatiana Maslany’s Emmy-winning work in the role of Sarah/Cosima/Alison/Helena/Rachel/Elizabeth/Krystal/Veera/Tony/Jennifer/etcetera: “They knew that Tatiana had just done an incredible job, and it would be really hard to follow that up. And then they just didn’t really want to retread old territory.”
Plus, on a budget and production level, depicting a Clone Club in action isn’t the easiest thing. “It’s very technically challenging to shoot the same actor playing against herself in the same scene, because you have to send them back to do hair, makeup, and wardrobe all over again for the other side — and so it’s very time-consuming and therefore expensive to work that way,” Fishko says.
Thus, she was relieved to avoid that specific angle, “because I think it would’ve just been even more challenging in terms of being in the shadow of the original show.” Instead, Fishko landed on the idea of “printouts,” which she says “came out of conversations that I was having with my husband, who is a former philosophy professor who really loved the original show. He had worked a little bit on personal identity earlier in his career, and so this idea of three different versions of the same woman, at three very different ages, came out of that.”
Fishko says “there were a lot of different parameters for this particular set of ideas — finding something that wasn’t too much like the original, but enough like the original, that we could make for a certain amount of money, that I could understand as a writer and bring something to, that made a lot of different people happy…. It was complex problem-solving.”
When you see Ritter in the role of Lucy, it feels like a natural fit for the actress, coming off a TV career including acclaimed work on Breaking Bad, Don’t Trust the B in Apartment 23, and Marvel’s Jessica Jones. Says Fishko, “She brings a lot of this combination of character traits that we had really thought about for Lucy — this outer toughness, this quality of a survivor who’s had to make her way in the world, with this sort of inner vulnerability that is in there. She brings that very easily to the screen. And that worked very well for Lucy right away.”
Funnily enough, the pilot script had already been written before Ritter’s casting; I confess to Fishko that if she had told me the role had been written specifically for Ritter, I’d have believed her. Fishko laughs. “It was a really lovely match and as we progressed in the season, we started to tailor things a little bit more to, to Krysten and what she was bringing to the character. Kristen very specifically didn’t want to get too close to doing things she had already done before. So we had some conversations about that at various points.”
Ritter picked Echoes from three different offers she was considering at the time, because “this was the obvious choice for me. I loved how many different relationship dynamics I got to play. I loved how much I was doing in the first episode alone: I had to learn ASL, I had to learn Spanish. I could fix a truck. It was just a very cool role for me.”
Additionally, Ritter enjoyed “the challenge of playing a character that has no backstory. Typically, I look for characters with really rich backstories, like Jessica Jones, for example. You always know where you’re coming from, because she’s so informed by so much that has happened to her, and this was a completely unique experience because you don’t have that. So I looked at it as a very different kind of acting challenge.”
To actually execute that, Ritter says, what she focused on was the idea that for Lucy, “once she’s off to the races, right at the end of Episode 1, it is sheer determination to figure out who she is, who’s after her, and why. So anytime I would get lost, that’s where I would go — that’s the clear defining action of what she’s doing.”
Orphan Black: Echoes (AMC Networks)
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