‘I love playing badass women’
Learning to use a knife, how to start a fight and speak in a British accent were all part of the fun for Elisabeth Moss in ‘The Veil’
The character of June in “The Handmaid’s Tale” is no shrinking violet — she sometimes fights back physically against the patriarchal regime of Gilead — but one suspects that Elisabeth Moss’s latest character could whup June’s butt.
Moss, the American actor who’s won two Emmy Awards for “The Handmaid’s Tale,” is MI6 agent Imogen Salter in “The Veil” and it sounds like she had a good time learning to fight like a spy, despite the weeks and weeks of instruction involved.
“I got to play somebody who knows how to fight, and who’s good at it and trained with it. And she’s not just defending herself from an attack, but she’s actually able to start the fight. That was really kind of fun for me,” Moss said in an interview.
Did she take away a favourite skill? Yes, knife handling.
“It’s actually a beautiful thing. And it’s quite intricate the way that you’re able to use your wrist to manipulate the knife,” Moss said.
Although Imogen is a very different person from June Osborne — she’s got a much livelier sense of humour, for one thing — she is also of a piece with the other strong women Moss has played: whether it’s ad writer Peggy Olson in “Mad Men,” holding her own in a fiercely sexist industry; tough but traumatized detective Robin Griffin in “Top of the Lake” or June, battling her way out of sexual slavery in “The Handmaid’s Tale.”
“I love playing badass women,” Moss said. “I love playing women who can fight back, who have to rise to a challenge and figure out how to get out of a situation. That’s fun for me. (Peggy) took a long time to sort of find that badassery, which she definitely did. But I love playing people like June and Imogen. I want to be like Imogen.”
Rest assured, though, that Imogen uses her brains as much as her brawn in “The Veil,” a six-episode thriller series debuting Tuesday on Disney Plus.
Quick-witted, intelligent and fearless, Imogen is tasked with coaxing information from an Arab woman suspected of being an Islamic State operative involved in a plot to attack the United States. Imogen rescues the woman, Adilah (Lebanese actor Yumna Marwan), from a refugee camp on the Syrian-Turkish border where the other inhabitants are trying to kill her, then the two travel to Istanbul, Paris and London, building a bond while simultaneously attempting to outsmart the other.
For Moss, 41 — who’s also known for portraying the president’s daughter in “The West Wing” — playing a spy was a huge part of the draw of “The Veil,” which she also executive-produced through her company Love & Squalor.
“I’m a huge fan of the spy genre,” Moss said in February at the Television Critics Association press tour. “I’ve always wanted to play a spy. An MI6 spy has, like, an extra bit of glamour to it, which I was really excited about. I did a lot of research beforehand; just reading a lot of books, any kind of female spy book I could get I tried to read.”
Alas, Moss didn’t get to pick the brains of real MI6 agents. “The thing about spies is they don’t necessarily always want to talk to you about what they do,” Moss told the TCA panel.
Her co-star Josh Charles (“The Good Wife”), who plays CIA agent Max Peterson, had better luck with operatives from that agency, while Steven Knight, the “Peaky Blinders” mastermind who wrote “The Veil,” was able to tap a couple of agents from French intelligence service the DGSE, which executive producer Denise Di Novi said is even more secretive than MI6 and the CIA.
Somewhat counterintuitively, it was a drunk, loose-lipped, retired DGSE agent who planted the seed for “The Veil” when Di Novi encountered him in a hotel bar. “He started telling me these things about how difficult it was that they had to start working with other agencies and how much they didn’t like it,” Di Novi said.
So the tension between DGSE operative Malik Amar (French actor Dali Benssalah), the swaggering American Max and Brit Imogen, who has a tendency to go rogue, is part of “The Veil,” but it’s also very much about the dynamic between Imogen and Adilah on their perilous road trip.
“What I wanted to do with this was to take huge issues and boil it down to two people in a car driving through the snow, and the nature of the conversation affects the outcome for thousands of people,” Knight told the TCA.
“What Steve did is create this beautiful map for Yumna and I to follow, these two women who were constantly trying to find out who the other person was and get to the essential humanity of this individual in front of them,” added Moss.
Moss had never worked with Marwan, who mostly starred in Arab language shorts and feature films before booking a role in the British period drama “Little Birds.”
Marwan said in a separate interview she had long admired Moss and was excited about working with her.
“The character of Adilah herself was very interesting and intriguing for me, especially for representation for Arabs onscreen. That’s something that I’m interested in doing, not just in the cliche way Arabs play in Hollywood … it was about showing her as a mom, as somebody that could be a friend and somebody that Imogen could also see some similarities with.”
Like Moss, Marwan enjoyed the physical aspects of the part: “I’m a very physical and sporty person. So I love doing action stuff and working with the body.”
The fight scenes weren’t even the hardest part of the shoot for Moss, though. It was learning a British accent.
“I worked on it probably harder than I’ve ever worked on anything because I tend to not do too much research or work too hard sometimes beforehand,” Moss said on the TCA panel. “But this, I did about six months … it definitely felt like, if possible, I had found something even more challenging than ‘Handmaid’s (Tale).’ ”
But “this was a great time. I loved it.”
In fact, Moss didn’t rule out playing Imogen again — or whoever she becomes next, since Imogen is just one of her many identities — were “The Veil” to be extended beyond its six-episode run.
“I felt that we just scratched the surface of who she could be in such an exciting way,” Moss said.
In the meantime, though, she was looking forward during our chat in early April to returning to Toronto this summer to shoot the final season of “The Handmaid’s Tale,” which she also executive-produces.
“We’re prepping now. We have a long prep period this time, which is actually great because going into our final season we need it. Because it’s a very, very big season,” Moss said.
“I have a meeting after I’m done with these interviews to just talk ‘Handmaid’s’ stuff. We’re in it. It’s happening.”
‘‘ An MI6 spy has, like, an extra bit of glamour to it, which I was really excited about. I did a lot of research beforehand; just reading a lot of books, any kind of female spy book I could get I tried to read.
ELISABETH MOSS