MOVIEMAKER.COM WINTER 2019 57
“
SHE APPROACHES
EVERY SHOT
AS IF SHE’S
ORSON WELLES
AND THIS IS HER
CITIZEN KANE.
THIS ATTITUDE
MAKES FOR
GOOD TV. IT
ALSO, AS YOU
MIGHT EXPECT,
MAKES MOSS
EXTRAORDINARILY
BUSY.
”
teem with bit parts and guest appearances,
with made-for-TV films and voiceover jobs
on children’s cartoons. She was in the
Harvey Keitel movie Imaginary Crimes,
the Steven Spielberg-produced kids
show Animaniacs, the ABC remake of
Escape to Witch Mountain—not nothing, and
gainful employment all the same, but hardly
the kind of arrival that heralds a future star.
It was in 1999 that Moss started to show real
promise. That year she appeared in a small
but memorable role in Girl, Interrupted as
the disfigured burn victim who befriends
Winona Ryder, and on Aaron Sorkin’s
The West Wing, as Martin Sheen’s teen daugh-
ter Zoey, involved, in West Wing fashion, in an
assassination attempt and a kidnapping.
Of course, this was Hollywood, where
landing two enviable parts in succession is no
guarantee of a lasting career. That summer
Moss was so strapped for cash she had to take
a part-time job at a local movie theater to pay
the bills, even though she was the daughter of
the president on network TV. “I was a recur-
ring character,” she says, laughing. “You don’t
make any money.” She liked the job. But when
she was offered a promotion, she knew it was
time to quit. “The manager asked me to be
assistant manager. And I was like, ‘Huh... No.
I don’t think this is my career path.’ ” So she
quit, packed her things, and fled to New York.
The expression Moss uses to describe
her ascent to fame is “slow burn.” After
The West Wing, Moss wasn’t in much of note
besides Law and Order episodes until she
landed Mad Men in 2007, a decade later.
“I know some people have overnight success
but it’s just never been like that for me,” she
explains. “It’s been so many tiny, little steps.”
In 2003, Moss starred in a low-budget
feature called Virgin, by a first time director
named Deborah Kampmeier. Moss plays
Jessie, a teenager who after being drugged
and raped believes she must be pregnant with
the child of God. The critic Dave Kehr, review-
ing the movie in The New York Times, praised
Moss’ “convincing, undistanced performance”
as a woman in extremis, and Moss was
nominated for an Independent Spirit Award
for Best Female Lead. Moss looks back at the
movie and her work in it as an important
moment in her career. “It was fucking crazy.
Nuts,” she says. “It was the first time that
I got to do the kind of work that I wanted to
do. And that was the first time that I was like,
‘Oh. I can do crazy shit and people might like
it. I can go to those dark places and it might
actually go over well.’ ”FREQUENT COLLABORATOR
If there is an easy way to account for her
collaboration with Alex Ross Perry, this isit. In his films—Her Smell is now the second
she’s produced and the third in which she’s
starred—Moss gets to do the kind of work that
she wants to do, amplified to the nth degree.
She wants to do “crazy shit”? Perry is the
man to furnish her the platform from which
to do it. Their affinity, an incredibly fruitful
creative relationship that brings to mind
Gena Rowlands and John Cassavetes, is
founded on a mutual desire: to see
Elisabeth Moss do radical, arduous, often
totally insane work on screen. Her Smell is
that for two and a half hours.
Moss stars in Her Smell as
Becky Something, the half-deranged, heroin-
addicted, alcoholic lead singer and guitarist
of Something She, a legendary Riot grrrl
three-piece who have a platinum record to
their name... or did, until they got wasted and
smashed it. Becky has an infant daughter, a
wary ex-husband, and a shaman mystic on
retainer, and a full European tour’s worth of
unbreakable dates on the horizon. She’s the
kind of person you wouldn’t trust to watch
your laptop while you used the restroom at
the coffee shop—and she’s the kind of person
so popular, beloved, and indispensable to a lu-
crative creative enterprise that her well-being
hangs in the balance next to the livelihoods of
a dozen other people. “She is terrible and toxic
and magnetic and a hurricane,” Moss puts it.
“She does not deserve your sympathy.”
This is familiar material for Perry, who is
renowned for creating characters as loath-
some as they are perversely likeable. “Becky
is the definition of a troubled, immature,
impossible brat whom people will tolerate
being around only because they benefit
from her creatively and financially,”
The Hollywood Reporter grumbled in its
review of the film out of TIFF. “Moss indisput-
ably makes her real, even when she’s insuffer-
able company.” Insufferable is, if not the objec-
tive, then at least a necessary consequence of
a movie so intensively aggressive. Every time
Perry makes a film, and especially when he
makes one with Moss, critics can’t help but
complain that he hasn’t made one about nicer
people. Maybe the two get along because they
both prefer films about fuck-ups.
Perry met Moss in 2013, when he was
casting Listen Up Philip, his third feature but
the first with a real budget and professional
actors. She was at the height of her success
with Mad Men, and had just earned effusive
praise for her work in Jane Campion’s mini-
series Top of the Lake—Perry could scarcely
believe she was considering work in movies
as small as his own, given her runaway fame.
The two talked on Skype, and hit it off; she
loved the mordant, literary screenplay, and
though she was not the lead, her character,NO SYMPATHY FOR THE DEVIL: HER SMELL’ S
BECKY SOMETHING (MOSS) ADDS TO PERRY’S LIST OF
VILE CHARACTERS HE DARES AUDIENCES TO ENDURE