The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Review
‘I wasn’t sure I wanted to be a mother’
Elisabeth Moss tells Gaby Wood how her role in the TV version of ‘The Handmaid’s ’s Tale’ changed her forever
‘Back in 1984, the main premise seemed – even to me – fairly outrageous,” writes Margaret Atwood in a new preface to her dystopian novel, The Handmaid’s Tale. “Would I be able to persuade readers that the United States of America had suffered a coup that had transformed an erstwhile liberal democracy into a literalminded theocratic dictatorship?”
The answer, of course, was yes. What’s more, the world she imagined, in which women’s wombs have become the property of the government, is now closer to reality, as states across America seek to tighten laws on abortion and President Trump bans federal funding of groups that perform or “actively promote” abortion abroad.
The parallels between Atwood’s fictional Gilead and modern-day America are so apparent, indeed, that protesters have taken to dressing in the red robes and white bonnets depicted in The Handmaid’s Tale, in order to defend their reproductive rights. Placards at women’s marches earlier this year read: MAKE MARGARET ATWOOD FICTION AGAIN. The handmaid has become a symbol everyone recognises: a literary invention turned polemical tool.
“I think it’s fantastic,” Elisabeth Moss tells me when we meet in London. “I mean, the fact that an image from a piece of art can have an impact or represent something for a group of people – that’s wonderful. Art should be something that people feel speaks for them.”
Still, she wishes it weren’t the case. “Unfortunately we’re in a position where we have to speak out about things that I think we were hoping we weren’t going to have to. It’s not a thing we take any pleasure or joy in.”
Moss is currently getting some of the best reviews of her career for her starring role in a new TV adaptation of The Handmaid’s Tale, about to air its fourth episode on Channel 4. The series – set in a society in which pollution has rendered millions of women sterile and officials “assign” those that are not sterile to high-ranking men to be “handmaids” and bear them children – is superbly made, unbearably intimate, and driven especially close to home by Moss’s performance as Offred, a mother who has been separated at gunpoint from her daughter and forced to become a handmaid in the household of Commander Waterford (played by Joseph Fiennes).
Offred witnesses rape and harrowing violence and sees women having their eyes gouged out as a punishment for promiscuity. Moss’s unusual looks and intelligent stillness makes the character both approachable and strange at the same time.
In person, the 34-year-old is predominantly the former. Just arrived in London from the Cannes film festival, where The Square, a Swedish film in which she stars, won the Palme d’Or, Moss is extremely cheerful, almost girlish. She is suffering from a cold – in front of her on a coffee table at the hotel where we meet is an array of anti-cold tactics: juice, tea, throat sweets, vitamins – but waves away any concern when she coughs. “That’ll happen,” she says. In leather jacket and ripped jeans, she talks about Cannes (“It’s like being dropped into a Fellini film, except French”), and about going to a pop concert for the first time in about 20 years. She went to see Bleachers (“Oh my god, it’s sooo guuuuhd,” she says, in perfect Valley Girl-ese, of their latest album) at a venue in Los Angeles where she used to go as a teenager. “It was, like, one of the only places you could go to underage,” she explains.
It is not that difficult to picture Moss as a teenager; she was already a professional actor by then. Now best known for her portrayal of the glass ceiling-cracking copywriter Peggy Olsen in Mad Men – a series of which she became, over a number of seasons, by far the most interesting element – Moss is in fact