THE EVOLUTION OF ELISABETH MOSS
Elisabeth Moss is fresh new face of feminism, motherhood
Handmaid’s Tale star returns to themes of sexism and motherhood in crime drama,
A decade ago, when Elisabeth Moss won the role of Peggy Olson on AMC’s critically acclaimed series Mad Men, she had no idea the gig would translate into leading roles on two subsequent series with The Handmaid’s Tale and Top of the Lake, nor that it would eventually establish her as the fresh new face of feminism, motherhood and reproductive rights.
That’s a tall order for a 35-year-old with a penchant for swearing, smoking and Scientology, but with Peggy and Offred mash-up memes circulating the internet, and a recent Emmy Award on her shelf, Moss is well aware of the accolades and expectations.
“It’s something I’m intensely flattered by, obviously,” she says.
“This is s--t that’s really important to me as a woman and these are issues that are really near and dear to my heart. So to be associated in any way with that movement is incredibly flattering.”
It will be hard for audiences not to associate those themes with Moss when she returns as Det. Robin Griffin on Wednesday night for Top of the Lake: China Girl, the second, highly anticipated season of the crime drama on CBC.
Following a four-year gap, the miniseries returns with a fresh story and a cast that includes Nicole Kidman and Game of Thrones’ Gwendoline Christie as Robin’s new partner in the search for a missing girl in Sydney.
From the premiere it’s clear that Robin continues to face the same sexism and adversity with her male colleagues as in the original, but this time the story shifts so that she’s also occupied by the thought of connecting with Mary (Alice Englert), the girl she gave up for adoption 18 years ago.
It was that narrative that truly piqued Moss’s interest in returning to the role, as it highlighted a different take on motherhood.
“When Robin first meets Mary she has this really honest reaction where she doesn’t feel like a mother. Here she is meeting this stranger that she doesn’t really know,” Moss explained in a round-table interview this summer at the Television Critics Association tour in Los Angeles. “There’s this idea that you’re supposed to meet or have a child and just start feeling like the queen mother and lactating or something. From the women I’ve spoken with, that’s not exactly true all the time; everyone has a different experience.”
It’s certainly a different experience than Moss — who has no children of her own — had with The Handmaid’s Tale and that show’s dystopian world of Gilead, where fertility is celebrated (and coveted) above all else. The show, which won a total of eight Primetime Emmy Awards last month, is currently filming its second season in Toronto.
Yet the themes of motherhood in both roles speak to the actress’s interest in choice and what being a mother has traditionally inferred about womanhood in general. She points to women in other countries who are forced into giving birth, women who choose not to have children, or women who desperately want to be mothers and have problems conceiving as relevant examples of women who don’t get much
The themes of motherhood in both roles speak to what being a mother has traditionally inferred about womanhood in general
representation in the media today.
“That’s kind of the focus of this season of Top of the Lake and it couldn’t be more relevant. Ownership of your body and of what you want to do with it and what it means to be a mother is an interesting idea to me,” she says before considering her recent role choices in general.
“I’m a 35-year-old American woman. These are the through-lines of my life; this is what I deal with and I deal with a tiny, tiny bit of it as a white woman in America. I get the good end of the f---ing stick. These are the through-lines of our existence,” she says.
“When somebody like Hillary Clinton talks about Handmaid’s at the Planned Parenthood fundraiser, that’s like a f---ing wet dream for me. That’s amazing! It’s a huge honour, it really is.” Top of the Lake: China Girl debuts Wednesday, Oct. 25, at 9 p.m. on CBC.