‘Orphan Black’ Villain Jessalyn Wanlim Talks Being ‘The Most Hated Person on TV’

Jessalyn Wanlim is learning the hard way that when you mess with Orphan Black’s Clone Club, you also mess with their auxiliary fan army. A self-proclaimed devotee of the cult BBC America hit, the actress remembers being thrilled about going from a regular viewer to a cast member, playing the clones’ latest nemesis, Evie Cho. The icily brilliant bioengineer who heads up the babymaking Bright Born project, Evie has worked all season to realize her dream of changing the human genome from birth with her own line of genetically-enhanced infants. In the process, she’s come close to shutting down the Clone Club for good, erasing their years of research, staging an internal coup that ousts their creator, Susan Duncan, and — in her most heinous act — greenlighting the execution of Kendall Malone, the genetic source of all the Leda sisters.

Speaking with Yahoo TV, Wanlim points to that particular scene as being the moment fans really turned against her. “I’m the most hated person on TV,” she says, laughing. “Every day I wake up to fans [on Twitter] saying, ‘I hate you! But I love you! But I want you to die!’” And she’s been sticking up for Evie on her own Twitter feed, with great responses like these:

Being besieged with love/hate notes on social media just confirms to Wanlim that she — and her character — have fulfilled their intended mission. “It’s an amazing how much of an effect Evie has had on peoples’ emotions. People are loving to hate me, so I’m really honored. I was a fan of the show before I even got cast, so I knew what they were expecting from me, and my main goal was living up to those expectations.” Before the season’s penultimate episode airs, we chatted with Wanlim about Evie’s own turbulent backstory, her possible endgame and which clone might have become her BFF under different circumstances.

What’s fascinating about Evie as a villain is that her actions are almost understandable given the circumstances of her childhood, when immune deficiencies almost claimed her life.
Absolutely! I don’t think her actions are driven out of pure evil; she has every intention of making the world a better place, but she’s a “mean to an ends” end of lady, and winds up hurting people. While I was shooting, I didn’t think of Evie as an absolute villain until the episode where I kill Kendall. My job was to tell her side of the story, without getting into a good vs. evil mentality.

And given her personal history, her plans with Bright Born project make perfect sense in her mind. She wants to build better humans.
Not to quote that song, but Evie believes that children are the future. Maybe she was even dying to have children of her own. I consider her to be somewhat asexual, so she’s trying to figure out a way to make a perfect child that she could plant in herself, and be more of a trophy.

As we’ve seen, though, the Bright Born babies don’t always emerge looking happy and healthy. Did that nose-less infant look as freaky on set as it did onscreen?
I wasn’t on set the day they shot that, so I had no idea what the end result was going to be. But I think everyone screamed when we saw it onscreen. You never want to see a baby come out like that; it’s everyone’s biggest fear. [Effects supervisor] Geoff Scott works so hard to make everything look as realistic as possible, and he succeeded with that one for sure.

Do you think Kendall was the first person that Evie ever had killed?
Well, I don’t think Evie’s gone on a killing spree before! [Laughs] She’s killed a lot of babies in her experiments, but I think this is the first time she went ahead and eliminated a main problem. That’s why there’s a little bit of remorse and sympathy when she’s sitting in the car watching it happen. She doesn’t want this to be what she’s remembered for. But again, it’s a means to an end. And the minute something is accomplished, she checks it off her list and moves on. She’s not one of those women who feels bad about her choices.

If she wasn’t so set on having the Leda line extinguished, is there one clone she might have gotten along with?
Cosima’s knowledge of science and passion for her sisters definitely could have made her the one clone Evie might have had a friendship with. [When Evie tells Cosima about Delphine’s death] it’s in the most genuine and nice way possible. It was an underhanded threat to make sure I had her in her place.

As a fan of the show, what was it like to witness Tatiana Maslany’s acting process in action?
She made me feel so welcome. The process she uses is through music and dance, so a lot of [preparing for] Cosima involved African-style animal dancing. Every time we worked together with a character, she was always trying to find it in her body. She’d be playing two or three clones a day, and I was like, “How on Earth are you doing this? My brain would explode!”

Is there a clone you wish you had gotten more scenes with?
I would have loved to play with Alison! That would have been a lot of fun. But I think she probably would have pulled a gun out of her little sweater vest and killed Evie. Alison doesn’t really hesitate in whatever she’s doing, so I think Evie would have just died. [Laughs]

Orphan Black airs Thursdays at 10 p.m. on BBC America