Elisabeth Moss interview: from Handmaid’s Tale to horror film queen (2024)

Elisabeth Moss attacks her face with a pair of scissors in her new film Us. This is not a spoiler. The film is bonkers, but brilliantly so. It’s from Jordan Peele, who gave us the Oscar-winning horror head-trip Get Out, and who here increases the crazed innovation with exponential audacity. The Moss scissors scene arrives midway through Us, when we have already had eerie zombie clones, fearsome midnight chases, beatings, burnings, gruesome throat-slitting, and an unfortunate incident with an outboard motor. Yet still, in glorious close-up, the Moss moment is, perhaps understandably, a difficult watch. Moss, however, loves it.

“That was the reason I signed up for the movie,” says the 36-year-old former Mad Men actress, bubbling over with enthusiasm. “To do that scene. It was one of my favourite scenes when I read the script, and one of my favourite scenes to do. It’s crazy, super-weird and scary. And such fun.”

To elaborate more on the scene’s context might be to drift into spoiler territory, but a rough outline of the film describes Moss as Mrs Tyler (no first name revealed), the droll, heavy-drinking friend of Adelaide Wilson (Lupita Nyong’o), and a woman who is part of one seismic night of all-American horror.

Trees creak, shadows loom and scores of murderous doppelgangers emerge from the sewers as a country turns against itself. The film is inventive, thrilling and laced with biting political commentary (America is split down the middle, battling its own shadow identity). It is tipped for awards. It has the potential to be a box-office smash (Get Out made $255 million). And, crucially, it’s just the kind of rigorously smart project in which you expect to find Moss.

Her form is impeccable, on screens small and large. Nicknamed the “Queen of Peak TV” by New York magazine, she has starred in three game-changing examples of the form: The West Wing, Mad Men and The Handmaid’s Tale (she has also bashed out two seasons of the superlative Top of the Lake). Her most recent film work has been exquisite. She played a disapproving journalist in the Oscar-nominated The Square. She received rave reviews at January’s Sundance Film Festival for playing a provocative punk rocker in Her Smell, and at February’s Berlin Film Festival she wowed as Casey Affleck’s wife in the star’s post-apocalyptic drama Light of my Life.

She is, in short, having a moment. A prolonged moment. She seems to be unable to make a bad choice. “It’s just good fortune,” she says, modestly. “I’ve been doing this for a very long time, and I’ve gotten to a place where I’ve been able to show directors and producers that I can handle different types of material. But mostly it’s good fortune.”

Modesty, it transpires, is Moss’s thing. And it appears to be entirely genuine. On flipping between accents (posh English in Ben Wheatley’s High-Rise, then New Zealand for Top of the Lake)? “Oh, I’m only as good as my dialect coach.” Or on being repeatedly labelled, for her inspiring TV work, a “feminist icon”? “It’s incredibly flattering, but a lot of women who aren’t famous are feminist icons to me. My mother is a feminist icon.”

She is unflappable too. I ask her about her decision to star in Affleck’s film (about a father and daughter traversing a future world without women) despite a cloud of negative press that has hung around the actor since 2010, when he was accused of on-set sexual harassment (two lawsuits against the actor were settled out of court and dismissed). “I thought the film had an amazing statement, a feminist statement, about the value of women in this world,” she says. “And I thought, ‘Whatever happened, and whoever he is, this is something I can get behind. It’s something I believe in. And I’m glad he’s making it.’”

Moss says that she made a deliberate decision to seek out top-tier directorial talent such as Peele. Us works on many levels, she argues. As a film that features characters being chased down by their zombie shadow selves, it is, she says, “about that version of yourself that you keep inside, and that you don’t want anybody to see”.

On a political level, however, she explains that she discussed the film deeply with Peele last April. “We were still, at that stage, getting used to this new presidency. Or not getting used to it, as it were. And one of the things that Jordan mentioned to me was that people have voted, they’ve made a choice and aligned themselves with somebody. But they can’t all be bad. There have to be people who’ve made the wrong choice, an uneducated decision, and are paying the price for it. We can’t just have good and bad people. And that’s the grey area that the film is exploring.”

Moss shot Us in between finishing season two and preparing season three of The Handmaid’s Tale. She is speaking to me from Toronto, where filming is under way. That series, a blistering Margaret Atwood adaptation has, so far, won Moss two Emmy awards and a Golden Globe. She plays June Osborne, aka Offred, the defiant baby-making house slave to stolid commander Fred Waterford (Joseph Fiennes) in the grimly misogynistic world of Gilead. She is also the show’s executive producer and she ended series two on a cliffhanger, with June suddenly rejecting the prospect of escape and instead marching back into the lion’s den, and revolution.

She is midway through shooting season three. So, what happens next? “I really want to talk about it without spoiling anything,” she says. “In this season we’re working on the idea that resistance is a lot harder to do than one would think. It’s not just about grabbing a bunch of girls and forming an army and going for it. June is ready to fight, and to resist. But how exactly is she going to go about that?”

She adds that acting as June is the easy bit, the relaxing bit. Producing? “At this point we’re dealing with ten episodes, with edits in various forms of episodes one to six, while we’re shooting seven and eight, with scripts ready for nine and ten, so I end up with the entire season in my head, but at different stages. We’re working on a musical cue for episode one, a rewrite for episode nine and a director’s cut of episode five. It’s incredibly demanding, but I wouldn’t do it if I didn’t love it.”

Moss says that there is little difference between TV and film any more. She was there when it all began to change, on The West Wing, playing the rebellious yet loving daughter Zoey to Martin Sheen’s dream president, Josiah Bartlet. “I was part of that generation when the crossover started,” she says. “When we started The West Wing we were still in the era where movies were more important than television, and film actors were better. But that programme began to change the landscape.”

Moss had come to acting from dancing. She was brought up with her younger brother in Los Angeles by two musicians — her mother was a harmonica player, her father a jazz music manager. She listened to classical music and began ballet at the age of five. She danced throughout her childhood, while nabbing kids’ roles on low-level TV (playing, for example, the younger version of Nicolette Sheridan’s casino boss in the mini-series Lucky Chances, an adaptation of two Jackie Collins novels).

“And then at 15 it was a crossroads,” she says. “Because at 15 you start dancing professionally. Even then I knew that, as a dancer, even without injuries, my career would be done by 40.” She quit dancing, threw herself into acting, and within two years had nabbed The West Wing.

A hefty discussion on television and its so-called golden age follows. These are the key points:

a) There is not, apparently, too much telly being made. “There are over 490 shows, on TV and streaming, according to the last count,” she says. “But the good ones see the light, and people end up paying attention to them.”

b) The announcement, earlier this year, that Meryl Streep would be starring in the next season of Big Little Lies has signalled the end of any class distinction between TV and film. “The moment that Meryl decided to do television it was like, ‘OK. We’re done. There is no line any more. It has disappeared,’ ” she says.

And c) The Time’s Up movement is making powerful headway in TV productions. On film, not so much. “On The Handmaid’s Tale there was absolutely no way that we weren’t having a 50/50 male/female split of directors on the show. It was not a question, and there was no argument about it. That’s something that’s changed in the past year especially. This idea of, ‘Of course we’re hiring a female director. Why not?’ The number of female film-makers directing studio movies this year, however, is still appallingly, disgustingly, low.”

Moss lives in an apartment in the New York Upper West Side. She listens to music obsessively and often uses it to get into character. She listened to a lot of the Icelandic band Sigur Ros while playing Peggy in Mad Men. It was Eminem to play the Kiwi copper in Top of the Lake. At the moment, for June in The Handmaid’s Tale, she is listening to the Interstellar soundtrack by Hans Zimmer (“It’s incredible!”).

She was married, briefly, in 2009 to the comic actor Fred Armisen (they divorced after eight months) and since then has repeatedly claimed that she “hasn’t found the time to give myself to somebody”. Still true? “No!” she says, with a delighted chuckle. “I do have a boyfriend now and I will keep his identity private. So, yes, I have managed to find the time for dating. It’s been quite the accomplishment.”

The future too looks stellar. There’s a 1970s-set “gangsters’ wives” action thriller called The Kitchen (co-starring Melissa McCarthy), a rumoured key role in the blockbuster reboot of The Invisible Man, and even a long-gestating biopic about the life of Mary Mallon, aka Typhoid Mary, that Moss is also producing.

From the outside, it appears as if Moss has made it. “No, not at all!” she says, modest till the end. “I still do a scene, go home and think, ‘God! I’ve got to do better next time.’ I never feel that I’ve made it. I just hope that I can keep doing what I love. Because I can’t do anything else. I’m not good at anything else.”
Us is released on March 22