Executive producer John Fawcett takes TV Week inside the latest evolution of the Canadian clone thriller
In 2013, a little homegrown sci-fi drama sporting the inscrutable yet compelling title of Orphan Black hit our airwaves and slowly transformed into an international phenomenon. The provocative thriller followed an array of identical strangers birthed in an illicit experiment who found their way back to one another, formed a makeshift family and took aim at their corporate creators. It’s a story that made an Emmy winner out of Saskatchewan-born leading lady Tatiana Maslany (playing no less than 17 clones) and forever left its mark on the pop-cultural landscape.
How do you possibly follow up a creation so singular as this? Well, you don’t try to clone it.
“Orphan Black: Echoes is not Orphan Black. It’s its own show,” says John Fawcett, co-creator of the original and an exec producer/director on Echoes. But Fawcett is not the mastermind of this new TV experiment. Rather, taking the reins of the spinoff is Anna Fishko, known for her work on fellow AMC thriller Fear the Walking Dead. She’s also a woman who had absolutely nothing to do with the O.G. Orphan Black, which is a big part of what makes Echoes resonate. “Anna’s original concept was so unique that it became its own thing,” Fawcett reflects. “In some respects, my attitude was, ‘OK, now we have something that stands on its own two feet — how do we bring aspects of the old show into this new, completely unique concept?’”
Set in the near-future of 2052, Fishko’s tale is that of Lucy (Krysten Ritter), an amnesiac woman whom we come to learn was created in a lab by scientist Kira Manning (Keeley Hawes) — the daughter of original Orphan Black protagonist Sarah Manning — using a different sort of weird science. Over the course of 10 episodes (episode six of which airs this Sunday), our heroine must unravel the conspiracy behind her identity — a mind-bending quest that kicks off after she meets a plucky teen girl (Amanda Fix) who is in the same existential boat, and bears a striking resemblance to a young Lucy.
“Lucy is kind of a blank slate when she shows up. And the blanks have to get filled in,” Fawcett teases. “She’s tough, she’s very resilient, she’s got a bit of anger in her. She feels like she’s been betrayed, in a lot of ways. And I think that her toughness and her intellect is what drives her forward.”
Though not called upon to play a dozen or more distinct characters like Maslany was, new star Krysten Ritter (also an exec producer on Echoes) is a bravura talent all her own. “She’s super-unique in terms of everything she brings,” raves Fawcett, who directed Ritter in three season-one episodes. “She’s a person that can’t make a ‘conventional’ decision about a performance. It’s really quite mesmerizing to see what she’s going to do . . . I felt like every time I turned the camera on and didn’t say too much, she would always find really unique ways through the material that, often, I hadn’t thought of.”
All told, Echoes is, no doubt, its own creation — but there is plenty of shared DNA with the show that came before. “Orphan Black has always been a story about science and bad science, and scientific decisions made for questionable reasons. And I think it was kind of interesting [here] to make a clone show, but using science that didn’t exist,” Fawcett reflects. Moreover, he continues: “The goal with Orphan Black, in general, has been: What’s the most original way forward? Whatever direction the fans think you’re going to go in, that was often the direction we avoided.” On that note, we’re told that Maslany, unlike several of her old co-stars, will not pop by for a cameo — at least, not in season one. But as Fawcett lets slip: “Oh, Tatiana and I had conversations . . . I guess I would just say that I look forward to a day somewhere in the future where her and I are on-set again — even if it’s not about Orphan Black. She’s just one of my favourite people on the planet — incredibly gifted as an actress and just a really fun person to spend time with.”
“But she’s, like, really busy,” he chuckles. “Now she’s a big star, and I will probably never work with her again.” That said, the franchise’s former leading lady did give her blessing to the new-look Clone Club. “She just loves being creative and loves creative people,” Fawcett confirms. “She was very, very, very supportive.”
Orphan Black: Echoes airs Sunday, July 28, on AMC