ELISABETH MOSS’S TRAVAILS
Ex-lover sets upon her in this remake of Invisible Man with a modern twist B. MAGAZINE
The ghost that haunts Elisabeth Moss isn’t a dead ancestor or a restless murder victim. She isn’t even a real person.
That ghost would be Peggy Olson, the ad woman she played on Mad Men (2007-2015). It’s been five years and another hit series for Moss — The Handmaid’s Tale — but Peggy still turns up now and then.
“There are times when I’m in a scene and I have to stop and say, ‘Oh, that’s a little bit too Peggy’,” the 37-year-old Emmy winner admitted. “I’m not sure anyone notices, but I do, because she was with me for so many years.”
In her new film, opening in Thailand on Thursday, Moss plays a woman who thinks she’s being haunted — only to find out that it’s something stranger still. Leigh Whannell’s The Invisible Man casts her as a young woman haunted by the ghost of her late, unlamented ex-boyfriend (Oliver Jackson-Cohen), an abusive scientist whose death has freed her from his shadow on her life. It turns out, though, that he isn’t dead. He’s actually invented a means of making himself invisible and, in the process, more dangerous than he ever was before.
“How can you escape what you can’t see? He’s invisible, but she insists that he’s there and that he’s attacking her, abusing her and manipulating her,” Moss said. “Meanwhile everyone around her is saying that it’s not happening and she just needs to relax.
“As with many women facing abuse, no one believes her.”
She signed on because of the modern twist Whannell gave to the story. It wasn’t a retelling of H.G. Wells’ classic 1897 novel, he told her, but a “more grounded and modern take on this story”.
“Part of the reason I wanted to do it is that it became a feminist story about female empowerment,” Moss said. “You approach all roles in the same way. A role starts from the inside for me, and then I just go with it.”
Also on her radar, of course, is The
Handmaid’s Tale, based on Margaret Atwood’s dystopian novel. Season 4 of the series, which Moss also produces, will debut later this year.
The show’s depiction of a world in which a theocratic dictatorship rules virtually unchallenged, with women reduced to little more than slaves, is harrowing to watch. To the actors, of course, it’s a different story.
“For me it’s cathartic,” Moss said. “It’s an outlet. It’s work, obviously. You’re doing 70 hours a week. It’s a job. But it feels good that this feels important. Plus it gives me an outlet to explore my feelings about various issues.
“It’s important for all of us to have a place to put our feelings.”
Many viewers see reflections of present-day America in The Handmaid’s Tale, but Moss isn’t among them.
“I hope it’s a long walk to Gilead,” she said. “I think we are far from it. There are a lot of countries that are a lot closer. I’ve spoken to Margaret about it. Anytime I get around her, I ask as many questions as possible and try to get advice from her. One of the things I did ask her was, ‘How close do you think we are, and what can we do about it?.’”
“She said, ‘We’re not there, but you can’t close your eyes,’” Moss reported. “She said the things we must protect are freedom of press, freedom of speech and the right to protest.
“In Season 1 of the show, we did a scene where the government opens fire on a protest. The message is that we must speak about what we believe in. If we can’t, Atwood says, that’s when we’re in real trouble.”
Moss comes from artistic roots. Her mother is a musician and her father a musician who also manages jazz artists. A native of Los Angeles, she began her stage life in the family living room.
“I was always performing,” she recalled. As soon as she knew what auditions were, she began going out for television roles. At six she appeared in the miniseries
Lucky Chances (1990), and at nine played Baby Louise in Gypsy (1993), an adaptation of the classic Broadway musical starring Bette Midler as Mama Rose. She had her first recurring series role as Cynthia Parks on Picket Fences (1992-1995).
Moss actually hoped to become a professional dancer, studying at the School of American Ballet in New York and later at the Kennedy Center in Washington. However, acting kept getting in the way. At 16 she was cast in Girl, Interrupted (1999), alongside Winona Ryder and Angelina Jolie, and that same year she was cast as Zoey Bartlet, youngest daughter of President Josiah Bartlet (Martin Sheen) in The West
Wing (1999-2006).
“It was the first time I had ever done anything that big,” the actress recalled. “There were all these theatre actors from New York, and they had been in the business forever. They were professionals. I learned so much from them and from Martin Sheen in particular.
“They were kind. They were generous. They treated every single crew member as if they were the most important person on set. They were on time, knew their lines and had fun. They taught me how you’re supposed to be like on a set. They taught me that it doesn’t matter how big the show gets, you’re lucky to be there.
“They set the tone for me in my professional work life.”
Moss went on to play Peggy Olson, who began on Mad Men in 2007 as a naïve young secretary and ended it in 2015 as a seasoned advertising executive, a cigarette dangling from her lips as she carried a box of her things down the hallway of a new ad agency and into her future.
“We put on the soundtrack from Saturday Night Fever,” she recalled. “It was a big balancing act, because I was carrying the box and a painting. But Peggy owns every step. She’s proud and determined.” Nothing of that kind happens on The
Handmaid’s Tale, on which she plays June Osborne, a concubine whose life is lived under the thumb of an oppressive male hierarchy.
“I read the book as a teenager,” Moss recalled. “Then they sent me the first script and offered me the part. At first I thought, ‘It’s a very dark book. I don’t know if this is a good idea. How are you going to make a TV show out of a book that is all a first-person narrative?.’ Then I read the first episode and thought, ‘Oh wow, this is really good. They figured out how to do it.’”
She asked to read the second episode, and liked it even more.
“I didn’t want to sign on to another TV show,” Moss admitted. “It was only a few years after Mad Men. I was going to say no, and I remember waking up after imagining not doing it. Someone else was doing
The Handmaid’s Tale. I was like, ‘No, no, no.’ “I said, ‘No one else is going to do it.’ “I’m so glad I said yes. It has been the role I feel the most connected to, and I feel so proud to be part of it.”
On the big screen Moss has been seen in Did You Hear About The Morgans? (2009), Get Him To The Greek (2010), Truth (2015),
The Seagull (2018), The Old Man & The Gun
(2018), Her Smell (2018), Us (2019) and The Kitchen (2019).
For Alex Ross Perry’s Her Smell, in which she played a rocker, the actress learned to play the guitar.
“I practised for about five months before filming,” she recalled. “I knew I wasn’t going to become a guitar player someday, but I did learn to play songs at a slower tempo. I got some good calluses on my hands.” Next up is Wes Anderson’s The French
Dispatch, set to open on July 24, in which she joins an all-star cast that also includes Timothee Chalamet, Bill Murray, Willem Dafoe, Saoirse Ronan, Tilda Swinton, Christoph Waltz and Owen Wilson. A love letter to journalism, the film is set in a foreign bureau of an American newspaper in a fictional city in 20th-century France.
Moss is still only 37 — but, after more than three decades in the business, she’s constantly asked for advice by younger actors.
“The advice I give to actors is to just do it,” she said. “Just don’t think about it too much. Don’t worry about ‘This is the way I have to do it, because someone else did it that way.’ There is no right way to get into the arts. People have so many different paths. If you love it, go for it. Just do it.
“If you feel you can’t live without it, then get out there and do it.”