Fresh off the premiere of Marvel’s She-Hulk, actress Tatiana Maslany is opening up about drawing inspiration from an unexpected source: the late, beloved hyperpop icon SOPHIE.
“Musically, SOPHIE just lives in this place that I always want to live in,” Maslany, who plays She-Hulk’s eponymous emerald powerhouse, told Variety at the show’s red carpet premiere on August 15.
The Orphan Black alum described SOPHIE’s music as having “a poppiness and femininity combined with these clashing industrial sounds” — a unique blend that influenced how she played Jennifer Walters, a brilliant lawyer trying to juggle her practice with her newfound superpowers, which she obtained by accident from her gamma-irradiated cousin Bruce Banner (Mark Ruffalo).
Maslany specifically called out SOPHIE’s song “Faceshopping” as an inspiration for her performance. “‘Faceshopping’ was all about skin, commodification of [the] body and being separated into different parts,” she told the entertainment publication, “and that all felt thematically and spiritually connected.”
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Musicians and writers reflect on the artist’s otherworldly music.
Watching the “Faceshopping” music video, it’s easy to see why this track fascinated Maslany. SOPHIE directed an unsettling animated montage centering on a 3D model of the artist’s own head being morphed, distorted, and repeatedly destroyed, evoking feelings of depersonalization and performative identity under capitalism. In the context of She-Hulk — which, ironically, has become ground zero in the discussion of VFX art quality and labor conditions in Disney-contracted studios — “Faceshopping” is a symbiotic companion piece, a palette of high-femme noise accompanying Maslany’s portrayal of a woman struggling to come to terms with her own mutating flesh.
This isn’t the first time Maslany has given SOPHIE love. “I always come back to SOPHIE,” she told Empire in May. “What I love about Sophie’s music is this combo of organic and electrical, industrial-type sounds that felt connected to She-Hulk.”
It’s nice to know that even after SOPHIE’s tragic, accidental death in 2021, the musician and performer lives on in fans and fellow artists like Maslany. Everyone remembers SOPHIE in their own way; now we know how a superhero does it, too
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