€20M STAR OF
EXCLUSIVE
ELISABETH Moss’s career has been studded with awards amid a blitz of hit movies and TV series... and yet she admits landing roles has been far from straightforward.
The star of TV drama The Handmaid’s Tale confesses she was a disaster at passing auditions in her 20s.
Elisabeth, 38, says: “From the very beginning, I was never very good at uncomplicated characters.
“I never got the part. I think people think when you get to a certain place in your career, they assume it’s always been that way and for me, it’s only been the last 10 years that I’ve been able to pick and choose what I do, if that. I have spent most of my career auditioning for things and most of my career asking to be in things and not getting things – like, 25 years of it.”
The star, said to be worth more than €20million, initially moved to New York from Los Angeles to study dancing at the School of American Ballet. At 19, and without formal acting training, she had to fight for auditions.
She had some roles as a child actress behind her – first appearing on screen at the age of six in TV mini-series Lucky Chances, with Sandra Bullock.
Elisabeth says: “I don’t believe in necessarily having a technique.
INSTINCT
“I never had any formal training, so I don’t have anything to make it any more complicated, or any more technical. So for me, it is all instinct.”
After playing the daughter of the US President – played by Martin Sheen – in The West Wing, Elisabeth appeared in US legal drama Law and Order.
But her breakthrough role came in brooding advertising drama Mad Men in 2007. She played Peggy Olson – an unlucky-in-love underling who becomes one of the agency’s stars.
Since then, the roles have come. Elisabeth says: “I was always better at playing characters that had multiple layers and were complicated and whatever was happening on the surface is very different from what’s happening inside, which obviously is very true of humanity and real people.
“So it was harder for a while and then, in the last 10 to 15 years, the characters – and especially the female characters of course – started to get more complicated and more interesting and it became a little bit easier to find those characters that I could actually play and do.
“It’s just nothing else is interesting to me. I don’t really know how to not play somebody who has more than one layer to them and I’m not bragging, I’m saying to me, that is humanity, that is who we are, and it’s not interesting to me.
“If somebody’s strong on the outside, it’s way more interesting that they’re falling apart on the inside. Or if they’re falling apart at the beginning of the movie, it’s way more interesting that they get it together by the end.”
After her award-winning stint in Mad Men, Elisabeth landed a string of movie roles ranging from comedy Get Him to the Greek to suspense thriller The Invisible Man. On the small screen, she won a Golden Globe as a detective in Top of the Lake. But her biggest role was to
I would love to do a romcom. It’s not like Sandra Bullock called and I said ‘nah’. I’d love it... ELISABETH MOSS REVEALING ROLE THAT HAS ELUDED HER SO FAR
come in 2017 – as June in The Handmaid’s Tale, based on Margaret Atwood’s novel and currently back on Channel 4.
And Elisabeth – now a producer, as well as its star – admits it has been her greatest part. Another Golden Globe and an Emmy are testimony to that fact.
She says: “I will forever miss playing this character when it’s done.
“I love her more than probably any character I’ve ever played and look up to her. But I guess my hope is that something that June has, which in a way is her best quality, but it’s also her downfall, is that she believes the best of people.”
The Handmaid’s Tale features a night