“You can always bring somebody back, but there’s something really nice about leaving,” says Tatiana Maslany in an exclusive interview with Gold Derby about “Perry Mason” (watch the video above), to which she will not be returning for its ordered second season. Maslany plays Sister Alice McKeegan on the first season of the drama, which HBO aired last summer and stars fellow Emmy Award winner Matthew Rhys in the eponymous role. “I’m more excited about an ending that doesn’t really end, that doesn’t necessarily have a cap to it,” explains Maslany before adding, “That felt like the story for Alice in that universe.”
Maslany muses, “The questions continue for me to this day about that character and that’s what’s so great about her.” Inspired by the contemporaneous historical figure Sister Aimee Semple McPherson, Alice is the celebrity preacher who leads the fictional Radiant Assembly of God congregation in 1932 Los Angeles. (Maslany reveals that her evangelist originates from Saskatchewan in homage to her own upbringing.)
“Sister Alice is such an interesting creature because she’s very in the public eye, so she’s very curated and her image is very specific. Her image is very maintained to create the sense of her largeness — her connection to god,” explains Maslany. The actress continues, “The moves she made, I never knew where she was going to go next. I didn’t know what side of morality she really laid on and so, I was so I was so curious about her and had so many questions about her and found her so funny and so interesting and so it was a joy to get to step into her shoes.”
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