Sarah Manning

Sarah Manning is a grifter come home broke, watching a woman who looks exactly like her step in front of a train. She's a con artist and a mother trying to get her daughter back, quick-tongued, self-interested, allergic to authority — and suddenly stealing a dead stranger's identity just to survive the week.

She's the audience's entry point into a show about identity, so the writing makes her the skeptic: streetwise, unsentimental, quicker to lie than to trust. Tatiana Maslany plays her as the anchor performance among many versions of herself, and the trick is that Sarah never feels like the 'default' one — she feels like a person first.