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SCREAM QUEEN
The Handmaid’s Tale is dark, but Elisabeth Moss’s new horror movie will have you jumping out of your seat, she says – just like her poor mum
Elisabeth Moss n how she aught the horror ovie bug – and what we can xpect in series our of The Handmaid’s Tale
Unsurprisingly, given that Elisabeth Moss’s recent credits include dark TV thrillers Top Of The Lake and The Handmaid’s Tale, as well as last year’s psycho-horror film Us with Lupita Nyong’o, her mother dreads seeing her on the screen.
‘It’s not the normal actor’s mother’s experience,’ Elisabeth laughs of the dark places her mother has been required to watch her go lately. ‘It’s not like she can sit down in front of The Handmaid’s Tale, order a takeaway and enjoy watching her daughter be terrorised. I mean, she gets that it’s not real, of course. She’s an artist herself, a musician, so she appreciates the creativity I’m putting into it. She loves what I do and always compliments me on my performances.
‘But she’s also a mother, and she definitely doesn’t like seeing me upset. She laughs at herself about it. She says, “I know it’s not real, but it’s hard for me to see you like that!”’
Linda Moss of Los Angeles had better steel herself for her daughter’s next on-screen appearance then. In The Invisible Man, a bone-chilling sci-fi horror film, Elisabeth, 37, plays Cecilia Kass, the wife of brilliant scientist Adrian Griffin (British actor Oliver JacksonCohen). Rich and handsome, he’s charming in public but a monster of controlling abuse behind closed doors.
After Cecilia manages to escape the marriage, she’s told Adrian has killed himself and left her a large chunk of his fortune. But she soon discovers the truth is far darker – he’s faked his death, used his scientific genius to find a way to make himself invisible and now intends to terrorise her wherever she goes.
‘Something you can’t see is much more frightening than something you can see,’ she says. ‘As soon as we know what we’re fighting against we can fight back, or at least know that we’re being attacked. But if we can’t see it there’s nothing we can do – we’re powerless.’
The attacks on Cecilia don’t let up, from handprints appearing on her shower door to sheets being ripped from her bed and, eventually, an edgeof-the-seat fight between a character the audience can see and a character they can’t. Cecilia spends most of the film being abused physically and psychologically – stalked, attacked, desperate and frightened. In other words, Elisabeth admits, it was more or less the project of her dreams.
‘I’d really wanted to do another scary movie,’ she says, looking as
far removed from a horror victim today as is possible in a figure-hugging scarlet dress, her mouth a slash of matching red and her blue eyes shining bright. ‘I obviously have a very high tolerance for dark material and I’m not easily frightened, so I love that genre. I had a small part last year in Us and I loved the experience, so I got the bug for horror films.
‘And then I was sent this script and I read it, and it was not only a horror film but also an incredible character piece. It was addressing many of the issues in the world we’re all talking about right now – bullying, domestic abuse and violence, women losing their voices, women not being heard or believed. I thought it was kind of brilliant of Leigh Whannell, who wrote and directed it, to put all of that into this construct of a monster movie.’
It’s not what you’d call a glamorous role – she spends most of the
film dressed in sweatpants or less, with minimal make-up, dark circles under her eyes and lank hair. All the better, she says. ‘I love it! I love that stuff. I’m the one who’s always pushing for more, “Make me look worse!” Personally I like to wear a lot of make-up – I love lipsticks and I have a lot of them – but when I’m acting I really don’t care what I look like and I find it’s much more interesting to explore other ways of looking. It’s important to me not to have that vanity.’
As for the bleakness of the material, she says she and Oliver – known before this for Lark Rise To Candleford, Mr Selfridge and more recently The Haunting Of Hill House – made sure they lightened things up. ‘We honestly had to be separated a lot of the time because we were constantly making jokes and chatting,’ she says. ‘It actually got annoying for people – Ollie even had to be kicked off the set sometimes so that we could work. ‘The search for an actor to play Adrian had been long because we wanted someone who wasn’t a typical moustache-twirling villain. If he was really going to be this monstrous character, he also had to be charming and intelligent, someone who’d make you think, “I see how Cecilia was taken in by him.” Ollie is very funny and he and I clicked as soon as we met.’
She says she’s been drawn to the dark side of entertainment ever since she was a girl. ‘It began when I was 11 or 12, I’d get together with my girlfriends and we’d watch horror movies and scare the s**t out of ourselves. I started with the classics like Poltergeist, The Exorcist, It, and of course The Shining. Then later on I got a bit more into the arthouse stuff like Rosemary’s Baby. These days, I feel like there’s been a quiet resurgence in the early style of films with stuff like Get Out, A Quiet Place and Bird Box. I think there’s a surge of really smart storytelling in horror movies that goes back to the days of the original horror films, and that’s exciting.’
When she’s not working, Elisabeth – who was raised in Los Angeles and made her screen debut aged eight in the 1990 TV mini-series Lucky Chances, based on two bestselling novels by Jackie Collins – lives quietly in her one-bedroom apartment in New York. She likes nothing better than coming home, mixing herself a cocktail, ordering a takeaway and settling down for an evening of TV watching. A cosy scene, and I can’t help commenting it’s somewhat at odds with the recent photographs of her arriving at Jennifer Aniston’s star-studded 51st birthday party at LA’S smart Sunset Tower Hotel.
She throws back her head laughing. ‘Allow me to clarify that,’ she says. ‘I was not a guest at the party. I’m a tremendous fan of Jennifer Aniston – as we all are – but I’ve only met her once, on the red carpet. I was staying at the hotel and I’d been out for sushi with my brother and he’d dropped me at the hotel afterwards. I was just as excited about Jennifer Aniston’s birthday party being there as anyone else was!’