Elisabeth Moss

OF ‘SHINING GIRLS’ ON APPLE TV+

To play assault victim Kirby in “Shining Girls,” did you feel you needed to draw upon any possible personal experiences to capture her emotions as fully as possible?

I always try to pull in from my own life, even if I don’t have a direct parallel with the character. I’m always trying to pull from any kind of experience I may have had, because for me, that just obviously is going to make it feel more real and more honest. I’m always trying to connect to some idea that I feel like,

“Oh, I can understand that.”

Even if I haven’t had that particular experience that Kirby has had, I can understand the feeling that she might be getting from that experience or I can

understand that particular relationship with that person. For this, honestly, I pulled so much from the scripts and from conversations that Silka (screenwriter and executive producer Silks Luisa) and I had. We first spoke about the script, the first script almost two years ago now, I think, and it was just an immediate understanding of the tone and the character and the story that she was trying to tell. There were very few times when we in were on different pages about how Kirby would react to something, and you just kind of get lucky

when that happens.

Though it’s within the confines of a drama, do you think “Shining Girls” deals realistically with the aftermath of assault for the victim?

Part of what I thought was simultaneously challenging, but also I thought really beautifully done by Silka and the writers, was that the analogy of trauma was honest. And it was very important to us to make sure that we didn’t wrap everything up in a tiny little bow, and that it wasn’t easy, and it wasn’t something that if you fixed one thing, it would go away. I think that an incident like that, Kirby will never be able to move on from, which is the analogy of the show. If you had experience a trauma that – whether it’s an attack, whether it’s losing a loved one – it’s a giant shift

in your life that turns everything upside-down.