ORPHAN BLACK Star Tatiana Maslany Teases What's To Come In THE NEXT CHAPTER Audiobook - EXCLUSIVE

Two years after their journey came to a close on television, the sestras are back in an all-new audiobook that will continue the story of Orphan Black eight years after the events of the epic series finale. 

Orphan Black: The Next Chapter will feature narration from the one-and-only Tatiana Maslany, who won a Primetime Emmy award for her outstanding work on the critically-acclaimed series. 

The first season will contain ten episodes, the first of which is now officially available to listen to and/or read on Serial Box, with a new episode set to be released every week. The audiobook will take a brief mid-season hiatus after episode five, but will be back with more episodes sometime in October. 

The writing team consists of New York Times bestselling and award-winning authors including Malka Older (Infomocracy, Null State); Madeline Ashby (Company Town, VN); Mishell Baker (Borderline, Phantom Pains); Heli Kennedy (Orphan Black: Deviations); E. C. Myers (Fair Coin; The Silence of Six) and Lindsay Smith (Sekret, Skandal). 

Ahead of the debut of the new series, I was granted an exclusive opportunity to sit down with Maslany to chat about her eagerly awaited return as the Project Leda clones, which include, but are not limited to, Sarah Manning, Alison Hendrix, Cosima Niehaus, Helena and Rachel Duncan.

Plus, it also sounds like we'll be further exploring Charlotte, who's grown up as a self-aware clone, and meeting plenty of new clones that weren't introduced on the television series, including Vivi, who will apparently have a big role to play in the first episode. 

ROHAN: I know that when you were working on the show you had different days where you’d play a different clone, just to get fully immersed in the character. Did you find yourself revisiting that process for the audio series?

TATIANA MASLANY: I had to remind myself, just sort where they sat in my body and vocally where they sat, but it was kind of bizarre how quickly they came back. It’s fun to get to revisit them and to play those characters again and try new things out and the voices, as they’re written on the page, are pretty similar to how the characters were written on the series.

So, it’s been a bizarre dream. *laughs* There’s a lot of muscle memory involved for sure.

ROHAN: When the series ended, Charlotte was still a young girl, but she was also a self-aware clone just like Rachel, although she was raised very differently I’m assuming. Will the new series explore her experiences growing up in a completely different world to her sisters?

TATIANA: Yeah, that’s actually one of my favorite aspects of the audiobook because we get to see Charlotte and Kira’s friendship and their lives and how they’ve managed to survive this crazy journey with the way that they’ve been brought up and how it’s affected them and how they’re breaking out and becoming their own people because they’re now in their early teens.

Yeah, I really enjoy their storylines and seeing where they have come to because they were also, sort of, outsiders within the clone group, not entirely within the same bracket as the rest of the clones, so it was fun to see that and explore their story further.

ROHAN: The last time we saw Helena, she was finally happy with her sestras and her babies, but I imagine she’ll find herself back in the thick of the action in the audiobook.

She was probably your most physical - and most violent - role on the show, so how did you approach bringing her physicality to an audio format? And how much fun is it to be Helena again?

TATIANA: We haven’t finished the series yet, haven’t gotten all the scripts yet and we haven’t recorded them yet, so I assume that Helena is going to play a more pivotal role in the next few episodes.

She’s kind of off to the side right now, sort of off in the woods somewhere - *laughs* - in classic Helena style, but I hope she comes back too.

ROHAN: I know the audiobook has a different creative team, but are show creators Graeme Manson and John Fawcett involved in any capacity? Does the audio team consult with them like a big collaborative effort or are they just moving in a new direction?

TATIANA: I don’t know if they are involved explicitly. I know there are a few people involved with the audiobook that were involved with the series in different ways. Heli Kennedy, who is writing for the books, was on set a lot during the series, so she’s definitely keeping continuity between the two.

Yeah, I think it’s quite a new creative team, which is really cool. It’s inspired by (the show) obviously, but not exclusively from the series, which gives it some freedom to grow.

ROHAN: Orphan Black has become a phenomenon of sorts over the years. When you were first cast, did you foresee the series having this sort of timelessness with fans and expanding into different mediums like comic books and now the audio series?

TATIANA: Yeah, oh my god, no, not at all. *laughs* I didn’t even think we were - like we didn’t even know how we were going to get through the first season. *laughs*

So, yeah, I foresaw none of it, I was just so excited to be apart of it and so kind of in the moment and not looking too far ahead, but as we grew, in terms of a fanbase and stuff like that, it definitely felt like the extension was more possible and just more likely, in terms of the fans wanting that kind of stuff and creating it on their own - writing books and essays and songs and all of that about the series - which is just super inspiring. It was fun to meet them and make something for them.

ROHAN: With you now working on the audiobook, would you ever be open to the possibility of revisiting the show in live-action, possibly even as a miniseries for television or Netflix or something like that?

TATIANA: I mean I’m so happy with the visual version that we’ve done, I think it ended as it should and I’m happy to do other things that are in different mediums. I think that’s a cool way to explore it without rehashing the same things, but yeah, I don’t know if I would be up for that. It would depend on the writing and all of that. For me, it feels like it was a closed chapter.

Two years after the show went off the air, Orphan Black (BBC America and Boat Rocker Media) is back with The Next Chapter, which picks up the story eight years in the future and features many of the same characters. The show wrapped with the destruction of the clone program, Project Leda. Since their victory, the sestras—Sarah, Alison, Cosima, and those they love, have been free to live quiet, anonymous lives. But the cost has been high. All of them are living less-than-full lives in order to protect themselves and each other. Everything changes when the sestras discover that there are more clones out there.