‘Maximum Pleasure Guaranteed’: Tatiana Maslany, Jake Johnson, David Gordon Green & David Rosen On Lonely Screens, Bad Decisions, ‘She-Hulk,’ ‘Spider-Verse’ & More [Bingeworthy Podcast]

Some shows walk into the room with a genre label pinned neatly to their shirt. They wear it like a badge of honor and adhere to all rules therein. “Maximum Pleasure Guaranteed” kicks the door open, knocks over the lamp, checks its phone (Where’s my phone?!), spirals emotionally, and somehow still has time to become a murder mystery. It’s part divorce drama, part paranoid thriller, part loneliness comedy, and part “please stop making that decision, Paula” anxiety machine. Better yet, it knows exactly how messy that cocktail should taste, and, boy, does it taste good.

The new Apple TV+ series stars Tatiana Maslany as Paula, a lonely single mother caught in the meat grinder of divorce, custody fights, work stress, and modern connection. When she reaches out through her computer for something that looks like intimacy, or maybe proof that she still exists outside everyone else’s demands, she tumbles into a voyeuristic thriller that writer David Rosen described as a “modern day Rear Window.” The series also stars Jake Johnson as Carl, Paula’s ex-husband and co-parent, a man who often looks like the reasonable adult in the room until reason starts feeling a little too much like the wrong kind of control.

On this episode of Bingeworthy, host Mike DeAngelo speaks with Maslany, Johnson, Rosen, and director David Gordon Green about building the show’s live-wire tone, turning a broken relationship into a suspense engine, and finding humor inside a life that already feels like it has 19 browser tabs open.

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For Maslany, who has long made a meal out of fractured identity and emotional shape-shifting in projects like “Orphan Black” and “She-Hulk: Attorney at Law,” the attraction was not that “Maximum Pleasure Guaranteed” fit into a familiar lane. It refused to stay inside one.

“That tonal chaos was so exciting to me that I couldn’t place it,” Maslany said. “I was asking, ‘What do you feel like this might tonally resemble?’ There were a few references, but it felt like its own thing. And that was really exciting to me because it felt like we would be building it as a collective, as an ensemble. And also just the ensemble of characters in it, all so different and fun, and nobody is one thing. Everybody’s got multiple sides to them.”

That multiplicity is crucial to Paula, a character whose desire is treated almost like a crime. Every time she reaches for connection, independence, pleasure, or even simple relief, the world seems to slap her hand away. Maslany said that reading the character clicked for her during the process.

“It’s like every time, yeah. Her desire is the thing that got her in trouble in the first place,” Maslany explained. “And her desire is also loneliness and need to connect, and very human and very real. So it is an interesting navigation of that. Where she does try to fight, as much as she’s fighting for, ‘Hey, look how responsible I am and look how together I am and look how good of a mother I am,’ she’s also like, ‘I want to be myself. I want to be able to live my life.’”

Tension also lives in Paula’s relationship with Carl. Maslany and Johnson had to create a whole history for people who feel deeply familiar and, at the same time, painfully estranged. Their first major scene together became a kind of pressure test for that dynamic.

“What’s great about working with Jake on this is the first scene we had was the first scene that we see each other in, where I come in to go get Hazel,” Maslany said. “We start very civil, and then you start to feel those little itchy moments where both of us could blow. It’s interesting playing that with an actor whom you don’t know. You have to play with this history, but what’s so great about Jake is that he brings in all that history, and I bring in all of the stuff I know about being in a relationship. The two of us are strangers, Paula and Carl are strangers to each other because they’re in a totally different dynamic. And yet there’s a lot of affection there.”

Johnson was equally drawn to the chance to play Carl because the role was not another easygoing guy audiences instinctively want to grab a beer with. For an actor so closely associated with charm, Carl offered something sharper.

“Very rarely do I get the opportunity to play a character like Carl that isn’t something people have seen me do before,” Johnson said. “Because very rarely are people going to offer something that they don’t know. But the safety I felt in it was that David Gordon Green was doing the pilot. I’ve been dying to work with David Gordon Green for over a decade. The writing was so crisp, and then the idea of working with David was, I mean, I would do just about anything with him.”

Johnson said he would love to keep testing that likability in darker directions, but he needs the right combination of filmmaker, script, and family logistics.

“I would love the opportunity to play a serial killer,” Johnson said. “I’d love the opportunity to play somebody who uses his charm to get in, and then shows the other side. But with that, you need a director who’s a partner, a great script, and for me, it’s got to either be in Los Angeles, or I’ve got to have a small enough part where I could be home a lot of the time. After my kids turn 18, if this business is still going the way it’s going, I’m very happy to go to Iceland and play a really dark character. But I’m not missing a fall to do it at this point.”

Still, much of the show pushed Johnson into more bruising territory, particularly opposite Maslany.

“Some of the fights with Tatiana, she’s such a great actress. I loved her. Jesse Hodges is so good,” Johnson said. “I would really feel in certain scenes that I was taking this job home with me more than I’m used to on other ones. I felt like I spent three months fighting with Tatiana. And when it left, I felt like that’s how I would feel to go through a divorce with that woman. And I don’t want to experience it. I’ve been with her, and I don’t feel good about this.”

From Carl’s perspective, though, Johnson does not see the character as simply manipulative. He sees a man trying to grow, trying to protect his kid, and maybe losing sight of how his version of help lands on Paula.

“What Carl’s trying to do is grow from that relationship and do what he thinks is best for his kid,” Johnson said. “He’s a little bit like, ‘For fuck’s sake, Paula, let me help us here.’ The whole Idaho scene, when I read that, I’d heard enough from the crew, all the other actors, the writer, David, the director. Everybody thinks Carl is being manipulative. And it makes sense. But when I was reading it the first time, and she said, ‘Don’t you think that’s a little manipulative?’ I literally went like, give the guy a break here. What else can he do? The show is not from his point of view, and he’s getting beaten up.”

For Rosen, the show began with a thriller engine, but the emotional circumstances around Paula quickly became inseparable from the suspense.

“It started as a thriller. It started as a single mom, lonely, living in this time of the epidemic of loneliness, reaching out through her computer, trying to find just a little bit of happiness and falling into her own modern-day ‘Rear Window,’” Rosen said. “The circumstances surrounding her were divorce, custody battle, not really high up on the totem pole at work, and just a phone in her pocket that was constantly buzzing with everything from bringing lemonade to soccer practice to you’re late for work to custody issues. So just really trying to set someone up, juggling the most possible chainsaws.”

Green leaned into that screen-based voyeurism by keeping the webcam interactions live rather than relying on screen replacement. That technical choice gave the scenes their strange, glitchy pulse.

“One of the things that we did do is we filmed those interactions live,” Green said. “So there’s no screen replacement. We’re watching Paula and Trevor exchange and trying to coordinate direction between two different locations for two different actors. It’s pretty complicated, and then you let it loose, and you do a few takes. But I love the flaws. I love the technical difficulties. I love the weird blips and blurps in the reception and the crappy Wi-Fi. All of that stuff plays into what I think is the eerie naturalism of some of those sequences.”

The result is a show designed to end each half-hour with an exclamation point, sometimes a question mark, and occasionally something closer to a frying pan to the face. Green even has a tidy formula for that kind of compulsive momentum.

“There are four boxes you gotta check on a show like this,” Green said. “You gotta have what, wow, weird, and whoa. And so if you got what, wow, weird, whoa, then you want to know what’s next.”

Maslany is the person carrying most of that what-wow-weird-whoa machinery, and Rosen said the show essentially needed someone with her range to exist.

“We dreamed of a Tatiana Maslany, and we got one,” Rosen said. “There was a lot on the role and, to be honest, I don’t think there was a show without Tatiana Maslany. It was written with no actor attached, and Tatiana wasn’t available to us when we first started working with Apple and began looking for one. But when she became available, like hawks, we swooped. She is just, you’d follow her anywhere.”

Green had previously worked with Maslany on “Stronger” and remembered seeing her range long before that.

“I remember seeing ‘Orphan Black’ for the first time years ago and just being astounded with that range,” Green said. “Then, having previously worked with her in ‘Stronger’ and discovering the great human behind the great thespian, which makes it a lot easier to dive into the trenches again and to the next difficult journey. When you’ve got someone that has that sense of playfulness, totally prepared and ready to try something new and innovate if it’s not working or if there’s an exploration to be had, she’s ready to party.”

Rosen also praised Maslany as a collaborator, not just a performer.

“Beyond what you see on the screen, she is a great filmmaker and collaborator in everything that she’s doing behind the scenes,” Rosen said. “As a writer, you own the character for a while, but then it’s like your kid leaving for college. It becomes an actor, and you don’t have control, that much control anymore. When you hand it to the right person, it is the most incredible feeling in the world.”

The conversation also touched on Maslany’s future as She-Hulk, a character whose fourth-wall-breaking, legally caffeinated corner of the MCU feels uniquely tricky to fold into the larger crossover machinery of an “Avengers” film. Maslany said it would likely take someone like Jessica Gao to make that jump feel right.

“I think it would take somebody like Jessica Gao to weave her into that world because she knows that character so deeply and loves her and gets her tone,” Maslany said. “But there is something about She-Hulk being the star of her own show that makes sense. Because of the direct address, she is our narrator. I think it would be a really cool challenge to see her in some other context, but I do think the joy of She-Hulk is in the singularness of it.”

As for whether a Season 2 or a crossover is more likely, Maslany laughed off the question with a very She-Hulk-ready answer.

“A crossover would be fun,” Maslany said before buying into some of the toxic fanboy reactions to “She-Hulk.” “I don’t know. I think people would be so mad at me being on their screens again.”

Johnson also had time to revisit a couple of fan-favorite corners of his own career. First, there was Lowery from “Jurassic World,” a character Johnson said almost returned more than once.

“So the third one, the pandemic one, Colin and I were, there was a part, and we were trying to make it work,” Johnson said. “But my kids were so young, and I would have had to leave them. I couldn’t bring them because of the hotel, and everything was crazy. And then I know the second one, Derek and Colin had written a part for him, but then it went another direction. We were so close to it, and then Colin’s off the project. So I think that’s probably the end of Lowery, but maybe Lowery can find his way back.”

Johnson even had his own darker pitch for where Lowery could have gone.

“I was pitching for the second one with Derek,” Johnson said. “I was like, what if he comes back and he’s like Tom Cruise in ‘Born on the Fourth of July,’ that he’s got a big ponytail, where he had gone too deep, man. He had seen these dinosaur attacks. He’s got John Lennon’s cool glasses on, or he’s like the guy in ‘Jacob’s Ladder,’ where he’s just gone too far. I want a dark indie movie called ‘Lowery Explains It All.’”

Johnson also spoke about returning as Peter B. Parker in “Beyond the Spider-Verse,” a role he hopes is far from finished.

“I surely hope it’s not his final arc,” Johnson said. “I haven’t loved playing a character the way I loved playing Peter B. It might be the character I’ve loved playing the most. Mind you, Nick Miller, Lowery, all these characters, they do mean a lot to me. But there’s something about playing him and growing up caring about Spider-Man, and as I’ve aged, watching a new generation kind of take over everything and do it in their way, which is wonderful.”

Johnson said he has recorded some material for the film, and while he does not know much, he is excited for audiences to see Peter B. Parker back in action.

“There’s some stuff in there and some sequences that I think are going to blow people away,” Johnson said. “My big thing is, I’m really excited to see Peter B. Parker back to being Spider-Man because I loved the first one, he’d given up, and he sees it. And then I thought the second one was so cute with the kids. But once you have kids and you enter that phase of life, that doesn’t mean you’re dead. You might be entering an unthinkably strong period of your life. I hope Peter’s honored in that way. If the future goes on for him, I want to see my Spider-Man being Spider-Man.”

For Green, the conversation moved to another collaboration with Rosen on “Supermax,” an impossible-murder thriller set inside a hyper-controlled prison environment that was just announced with Will Smith attached to star. Green said it connects to a specific mode of muscular drama he has been craving.

“One of the things I’ve been wanting to do is find something that has that infused flavor of drama and action that we haven’t really got since we lost Tony Scott,” Green said. “The projects that I’m really drawn to right now, and as I’m revisiting a lot of those classic movies, those brilliant movies, have that kind of grit and substance. When Rosen and his writing partner, David Weil, showed me the script, it was triggering all these things. I’m always just looking to reinvent the buffet of the opportunities that I’ve had, the experience and the adventures that I’ve been lucky enough to have, and try something new.”

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Green also addressed the divisive response to “Halloween Ends,” particularly from fans who expected a more direct Michael Myers and Laurie Strode showdown. Green said that version never really gave him a personal way into the story.

“I really couldn’t find my end to a showdown movie,” Green said. “Everything that I write, I have to make it really personal, or I don’t want to get up in the morning. That’s what motivates me every day. And so that was a fun movie to find a very unlikely group of film references, like ‘Butcher, Baker, Nightmare Maker,’ ‘My Bodyguard,’ these movies that triggered me and made it personal to me. It’s not necessarily about doing a fan survey before you dive in; it’s about doing what’s meaningful to you and putting yourself and your heart into it. Hopefully, anything that I’ve done that’s divisive in one minute, over time, people can reconnect or find a different way in when time’s done its thing. So I hope those people who turned away from it or shied away from what I was trying to achieve in the moment, give it another shot.”

That, in a strange way, circles back to “Maximum Pleasure Guaranteed.” The show is not built from a fan survey either. It is a prickly, funny, anxious, deeply human thriller about how a person can be both desperate for connection and terrible at surviving it. It lets Paula be wrong, wounded, horny, lonely, smart, reckless, and still worth following into the next bad choice. That is where the pleasure hides, right between the cringe and the cliffhanger.

“Maximum Pleasure Guaranteed” premieres May 20 on Apple TV+. **Watch the full interviews with Tatiana Maslany, Jake Johnson, David Gordon Green, and David Rosen below.

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