‘Orphan Black”s Tatiana Maslany shimmies and shines on awards circuit

TORONTO – “Orphan Black” star Tatiana Maslany is on a thrilling red-carpet run these days, with kudos from Hollywood types, a shimmy with Amy Poehler and a flood of love from the Canadian Screen Awards.

The 28-year-old Regina native, who has deftly played seven clones with vastly different personalities and accents on the smash Space series, was up for a best actress trophy at January’s Golden Globe Awards — a bash she describes as “just a bizarre, whole other world.”

“It’s unlike anything I’d ever experienced before,” Maslany said this week in an interview. “I very much felt like an observer on the outside of a very crazy experience.”

That experience included cutting a rug at an after-party with Poehler, who co-hosted the Globes with Tina Fey and had Maslany as a guest star on her series “Parks and Recreation” last year.

“I did get to do a little dancing with Amy and that was pretty amazing,” Maslany said with a grin.

“She’s an amazing dancer. She’s, like, everything I want in a dance partner on the dance floor. She was in like a T-shirt and jeans, I think she’d changed out of her gown and she was just hilarious and awesome.”

Maslany also fielded compliments at the bash.

“One of the writers from ‘The Big Bang Theory’ came up to me and said that his writers’ room watches ‘Orphan Black’ and talks about ‘Orphan Black’ and looks at it with some kind of admiration, so that was really nice,” she said.

“Then the young guy from ‘Modern Family,’ the little boy (Nolan Gould) … he came up to me and he was like, ‘I love that show,’ and I was like, ‘Oh my God, that’s so cute.’ So we took a picture together. It was nice.”

“Orphan Black” heads into Sunday’s Canadian Screen Awards with a leading eight trophies already under its belt.

The dark sci-fi hit — which also airs on BBC America in the U.S. — won the awards at an industry gala earlier this week, including acting honours for Jordan Gavaris, Maria Doyle Kennedy and Natalie Lisinska.

It also won hardware for writing, direction, photography, picture editing and production design or art direction.

Maslany is still up for best actress heading into Sunday’s Toronto gala, where “Orphan Black” will also contend for best dramatic series.

She said she’s “just so happy that so many departments got acknowledged and got their due.”

“I don’t think any of us foresaw how it was going to be received, and also I just think it just hit at the right time,” she said of the success of “Orphan Black,” for which she’s also won a Critics’ Choice Television Award and a Television Critics Association Award.

“I just think it came out at a time when there was, I don’t know, maybe a need for women onscreen or something, or young women onscreen. We have a lot of young fans, young women who are fans and it must speak to them on a level, because I don’t know how many shows there are out there with these kinds of women in it as the leads.

“There’s just something about the zeitgeist right now or … society that wants something like that. And it could’ve been a total miss, it could’ve fallen by the wayside or fallen on its face. But we’re really lucky that it hit.”

Season 2 of “Orphan Black” debuts April 19 at 9 p.m. ET on Space.

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