This Saturday at 9PM, BBC America debuts its second original series, Orphan Black. A science fiction thriller, Orphan Black follows a young woman named Sarah (Tatiana Maslany), who is returning home after ten months away to try to reclaim custody of her daughter, who is being raised by Sarah’s own foster mother, when she witnesses another young woman, Beth, commit suicide at a train station. If that wasn’t unsettling enough, the other woman shares Sarah’s face. And as Sarah, desperate for cash, appropriates the dead woman’s identity, apartment—and as it turns out, the police department review she’s under for an unjustified shooting of a civilian—she learns that she doesn’t just have a twin: there are a disturbing number of other women wearing Sarah’s face.

I spoke to Maslany about the challenge of playing multiple characters in a single show, how viewers relate to unsympathetic female characters, and how science fiction depicts the near future and handles class. This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

In Orphan Black, you’ve got a core role playing Sarah, but you have to portray a number of other women as well. Was that one of the things that drew you to the series?

Absolutely…They’re all compelling, they’re all complex, they’re all very different. Sarah was definitely my entry point into the series. What fascianted me about her so much was her extreme flaws that were right out there, her behavior that was completely immoral and self-absorbed, always defending herself. What’s fascinating to me is she’s got that beautiful heart as well. She completely wants to be a mother to her daughter, and every part of her upbringing is saying she can’t do that, and she’s not worthy of that. It’s a really nice tension to play. And to get into all the other characters, each has a different worldview, and that’s how I approached them. How do they see the world? Is it a fearful place? is it fascinating? Do they love people?

Was part of the appeal the opportunity to build audience sympathy for an unlikeable female character? Men get to be anti-heroes far more often.

Yeah, that’s what I love about it. I think, for me, it was unlike any character I’d seen on screeen, any female character especially. She’s not immediately likable. She’s not good or bad. She’s very much an animal of impulse and instinct, of self-preservation and survival. People can relate to that. There’s something glamorous abou people on Breaking Bad or whatever, because I think it tapes into the darker parts of ourselves that we don’t get to experience on a day to day basis, or that society tells us is bad. And I think that’s what’s so compelling about Sarah. We’re all so flawed. we’re all like that. We’re all bad people sometime. It’s a matter of circumstance, it’s a matter of our rsesponse to the world and what it’s told us about who we can be and who we are. She’s really grown up in a world of hostility and violence. I’m happy that she gets to be the protagonist, that her action saren’t condemned.
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Robbie Rogers

On February 15 of this year, Robbie Rogers, a former member of the U.S. Men’s National soccer team and a professional player in both Europe and the United States, posted on a personal blog that he was gay. Rogers would have been the first openly gay player in major American professional sports, but he announced his retirement in the same post. In a New York Times article today, Rogers didn’t rule out a return to the pitch but said he had no choice but to retire. “I need to be a little selfish about this,” Rogers told the New York Times.

This week, rumors swirled that a National Football League player was contemplating coming out as gay in the near future. That prompted Seattle Seahawks defensive end Chris Clemons to tweet that a player coming out would be a “selfish act” that would “immediately separate a lockerroom and divide a team.”

That makes for an odd juxtaposition, the now openly gay former athlete thinking he’s selfish for coming out in his own way and the straight athlete who thinks it would be selfish for a player to come out at all. Clemons, who later tweeted that he had no problem with gay athletes but thinks they should leave their love life at home, could learn from the story of Rogers, who lived as a gay man in secret for years. Until last year, Rogers hadn’t told his family, his friends, or his teammates. He didn’t go to gay bars or date other men. It was, he told the Times, a terribly unhealthy way to live, though coming out has enabled him to find peace:

“I’m a Catholic, I’m a conservative, I’m a footballer and I’m gay,” he said, trying to describe his fear. “Imagine living all that time with just a cramp in your stomach. I kept thinking, I hope I don’t do something that makes people wonder, is Robbie gay?”

He added: “I was never close to coming out before. Never. I never went to any gay bars, never hooked up with a guy. It was so unhealthy and so bad that I felt this way. Two years ago, I would have thought that I would never come out during my entire life.” [...]

About a year and a half ago, he said, his fear turned into frustration. He realized he had never been able to feel complete happiness or joy because he always felt that he was hypocritical; as an example, he recalled, he felt little desire to celebrate after winning the M.L.S. championship with Columbus in 2008.

By January of this year, Rogers began telling close friends. Sacha Kljestan, a midfielder on the United States team who plays professionally in Belgium, visited Rogers in London a few weeks ago — the pair went to a pub to watch the Tottenham-Arsenal match together — and Kljestan said he had never seen Rogers more at ease.

Seeking that happiness and comfort in your own life isn’t selfish. Nor is it selfish for Rogers to step away from the game to seek out that peace without the media spotlight that would come from being an openly gay athlete in major male professional sports at a time when there aren’t any others. What is selfish is that someone like Clemens would put his own personal discomfort and insecurity at being next to a gay man in the lockerroom ahead of that person’s health, well-being, and ability to live an open and happy life as the person they are. What is selfish is that Clemons doesn’t understand what people like Rogers go through on a daily basis, and worse, doesn’t seem to care about understanding their struggle.

Millions of LGBT people are struggling with the same decision Rogers made, and an untold number of them are athletes. There are gay men in the NFL, perhaps even in Clemons’ lockerroom, who are having that same struggle, who live in the same closet in which Rogers spent 25 years, living a lie and unable to both embrace themselves and be embraced for who they are. I would love to see Robbie Rogers continue his career by carrying the banner for LGBT rights in sports. But it isn’t selfish of him to choose not to. But one day, a gay athlete is going to pick that banner up and take on that fight. If that person separates a team and divides a lockerroom, it won’t be because he is the selfish one.

The bridge is yours.

-Why Tyler Perry’s name is in the titles of all his movies.

-Martin Scorsese wants to bring Gangs of New York to TV.

-Go write for the AV Club!

-People are idiots.

This review discusses minor plot points of the third season of Game of Thrones.

“The truth is always either terrible or boring,” Sansa Stark (Sophie Turner) says in Game of Thrones‘ third season as she watches ships sail into and out of the port of King’s Landing. For two seasons now, Game of Thrones has laid out the terrible truths of Westeros, the fictional nation torn by war after the assassination of its king by his queen and initially created on the page by George R.R. Martin, and Essos, the continent across the sea where the woman who believes herself to be the exiled queen of Westeros is raising dragons and gathering supporters. While HBO’s fantasy series has always been an ambitious act of world-building and special effects work, Game of Thrones returns for its third season on Sunday as a more emotionally, intellectually, and visually audacious show than it was in the preceding two years. Whether Game of Thrones is expanding the roles of minor characters who previously were mostly on-screen as sex objects, articulating the growing threat posed by the White Walkers, long-lost zombie-like creatures who threaten Westeros’ human population, or staging a sword fight on a bridge that’s simultaneously playful and deadly, Game of Thrones is living up to the promise of its name, and staging a three-dimensional, and increasingly humane, chess match.

Three of Game of Thrones‘ preoccupations remain the same as they ever have: sex, violence, and sexual violence. But this season, they have a greater range, and an awareness of some of the show’s past failings, among them, the use of female nudity during scenes when characters are explaining ideas to each other. It’s a practice that’s handled with a healthy wink in the first episode of this season: when a sex workers asks Bronn (Jerome Flynn) “Don’t you want to leave something to the imagination?” he tells her “Trouble is, I’ve never had much imagination.”

Much of the first four episodes of the season, though, are concerned with longing and repressed desire, rather than consummated and displayed. While on the run through the Westeros countryside, Jamie Lannister (Nikolaj Coster-Waldau) tries to bait his captor, the female knight Brienne of Tarth (Gwendoline Christie) with rumors that she harbored desires for Renly Baratheon (Gethin Anthony), the aspirant to the throne of Westeros, who was assassinated last season. “I did not fancy him,” Brienne insists stiffly. “Gods, you did. Did you ever tell him?” Jamie nudges her, before becoming sympathetic, remembering his own incestuous relationship with his sister Cersei (Lena Heady), far away from him in King’s Landing. ” I don’t blame you, either. We don’t get to choose who we love.” In King’s Landing, Jamie’s son with Cersei, Joffrey (Jack Gleeson), is sitting on Westeros’ throne and preparing to marry Margaery Tyrell (Natalie Dormer), the daughter of a wealthy family, who was previously married to Renly. Knowing that he has a violent streak, and suspecting a sexually violent one as well, Margaery tries to tease out her future husband’s sexual interests as a means of channeling them. “I imagine it must be so exciting to squeeze your finger here and watch something die over there,” Margaery tells Joffrey, examining his new crossbow. “Do you think you could? Kill something?” Joffrey asks her excitedly, hunting a proxy for sex. “I don’t know, Your Grace. Do you think I could?” Margaery asks him. “Would you like to watch me?”
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