Tatiana Maslany Quotes

There are so few representations of women that look remotely real in scripted television.

I do fairly represent Middle Eastern women.

I love playing video games, but I'm regularly disappointed in the limited and limiting ways women are represented.

A lot of times I don't know if I trust the director to tell that film's story. Or I think it's inappropriate for a male director to tell a female story, or a white director to tell a black story. Everyone walks away from a movie differently, because you're relating it to your own life.

I try to write about real women, real people - in other words flawed characters.

I hope that doing truthful portrayals of people in a variety of circumstances gives people a kind of subterranean link to those characters.

I know one of the reasons I first started making Youtube videos was because no one looks like me.

I wasn't able to relate to anyone on TV growing up, so I wanted to bring my own experiences to the screen.

When people say to me, 'Why are you so good at writing at women?' I say, 'Why isn't everybody?'

Audiences want to feel represented, want to be able to empathize with the characters and the stories they are seeing on the screen.

Having been in some roles that really resonated with women, I became hyper-aware of how women are represented in Hollywood.

I am a perfectly normal woman. If what we do is storytelling and represent people that we see all day and every day, well, we do not see supermodels all day and every day.

People want to see real women on screen.

I know it's 'Dear White People,' and you can imprint all kinds of concessions about what the show might be about on the title, but my goal was never to, like, educate white people. My goal was always to create characters that you can relate to and fall in love with.

Of course I want the things I write to reflect well on me or anyone who might feel represented by me, but also, I'm not writing a guidebook on how to be or how my people should be seen. I'm telling very specific stories.

What does it serve any studio to not reflect the lives of people who are giving you money, who are crying out to you, 'Hey, please tell our stories.'

Anything in which you're playing someone real does make you feel responsible for making the story as true as it can be.

It's not that I am saying that women and men are completely different. But I do think that if you are one of the only people around the table who is a woman, by definition, you're different.

Traditionally, there's been a desire to make shows relatable so the maximum number of people would think of those characters as being recognizably like them. The risk there is you can push everything in a somewhat generic direction.

There are stories I wanted to tell, and they are not defined by what I look like.

When I choose a role, what I'm looking for is the ability is to tell our stories. Me being a black woman, that's just a given. It's going to be a part of any role I do, making sure I tell it truthfully and nuanced and in a way that many people can relate to.

You start with a generic body, but I think the first wall you hit with portraiture is comprised of history and storytelling and the nature of characters - whether they are historical or coming from literature or documentation. Those are the references we have to people, besides your family, and the intimacy of portraiture is in the specifics of individuals. For me, it came out of doing things about animals.

It's already not as easy, in the sense that interesting roles for girls and women tend to be few and far between. That's just the reality that I think most people would agree with. So that can be frustrating. I just get sent so many things that are like, "So, here's another story about a guy...." But that's just what it is. I'm kind of getting more excited about developing my own stuff, or getting involved early in projects and doing my best to make things that I care about happen.

I know when someone that's not you tries to tell your story, especially when you don't look like the person whose story you're trying to tell, you're going to screw it up. And the only way to get it right is to have them be as involved as possible.

We're trying, despite having done research and having obviously preconceived ideas, we try our best to be as open-hearted as possible, and try to create context. So that's always going to be the challenge, making a program like 'Gaycation', and we are always thinking about it, reflecting on it, and doing our best to show the whole picture as much as possible in a 45-minute span. Hopefully that comes across.