18 THENEWYORKER,M AY 9, 2022
PROFILES
DARK LADY
Elisabeth Moss—actor, director, rom-com fan, Scientologist—likes to play feral.
BY MICHAELSCHULMAN
PHOTOGRAPH BY STEPH MARTYNIUK
“
W
owzers,” Elisabeth Moss said,
peering down at a bloodied
corpse made of silicone. It was Janu-
ary, and Moss was on the Toronto set
of “The Handmaid’s Tale,” the Hulu
series on which she plays June, an
escapee from a patriarchal dystopia
known as Gilead. The series, based on
Margaret Atwood’s 1985 novel, imag-
ines a repressive theocracy that has over-
thrown the United States and forced
women into regimented roles, includ-
ing Handmaids, who are ceremonially
raped and impregnated by their Com-
manders. The first season, hewing to
Atwood’s book, introduced June’s life
as Offred, renamed to mark her own-
ership by Commander Fred Waterford,
played by Joseph Fiennes. By Season 5,
for which Moss was in preproduction,
June has fled to Canada and, along with
a pack of former Handmaids, pum-
melled Fred into oblivion. The nude
silicone body, wheeled out on a metal
tray, was his.
Moss inspected its exposed shin-
bones, mangled wrists, and clawed-
up chest. “Anyone want a charcuterie
plate?” she said, laughing. Moss was
vetting the corpse in her role as the di-
rector of the first two episodes of the
season; she began directing in Season 4,
and she is also an executive producer.
The day had been reserved for camera
tests, with the crew sorting out such
details as the exact shade of red that
June’s bloody handprint should leave
on a car window.
“I do have a penile note,” Moss said,
brightly.
“More? Less?” a prosthetics designer
named Zane asked, as they surveyed
Fred’s damaged genitals.
“Well, I just don’t want it to look
like they bit it off.”
“We could always add more on.”
“Maybe,” Moss said. “So it looks
more like it’s smashed.” Her eyes trailed
downward. “The toes look so real!”
Moss had freshly dyed blond hair
and wore a T-shirt that read “Liberté!
Egalité! Maternité!” At thirty-nine, she
has worked on television sets for more
than three decades, and she projects a
jaunty professionalism. “The Hand-
maid’s Tale” may be relentlessly grue-
some, but Moss’s off-screen presence
is as light as tulle. She snapped gum,
cracked jokes, and showed me photo-
graphs of her two tangerine cats, Lucy
and Ethel. A Los Angeles native, she
deployed the occasional Valley-girl “To-
tally!” Everyone calls her Lizzie.
On camera, though, Moss has an al-
most alien self-possession, channelling
extreme states of trauma, rage, fear, or
savagery. Her characters are often poised
at the crossroads of meekness and fe-
rocity. Directors like to shoot her in
lingering closeups, her knotty, expres-
sive face going blank with detachment
or flashing with wildness, her eyes star-
ing down her beaky nose like a pair of
determined headlights. Alex Ross Perry,
who directed her in three independent
films, described her talent for “looking
into the darkness and coming back with
a bit of a glint in her eye.”
Moss, who was raised in the Church
of Scientology, is one of the most un-
conventional stars of her generation,
and her career traces the trajectory of
the past quarter century of television.
At seventeen, she began playing the
President’s daughter on “The West
Wing,” perhaps the high-water mark
of turn-of-the-millennium network
drama. At twenty-three, she was cast
as Peggy Olson on “Mad Men,” which
starred Jon Hamm as the adman Don
Draper, part of a wave of prestige cable
series centered on male antiheroes.
Moss’s characters are often poised at the crossroads of meekness and ferocity. But as the show went on—and Peggy
