20 THENEWYORKER,M AY 9, 2022
cathedral, the site of a scene in which
June sits on a bench in Canada. Al
though she has escaped Gilead, she
struggles to adjust to her freedom, her
wrath fading into a kind of damaged
glee. A blizzard had dumped more
than a foot of snow on the city, and
Moss was barely visible behind her
scarf, hat, and sunglasses. She discussed
removing some recycling bins on the
day of the shoot. “We good, Boss?” she
asked an assistant director, Michael
Johnson, known as MJ.
“Yeah, Boss,” he replied.
Moss told me, “We all
just call everybody Boss.
MJ’s Boss, I’m Boss—or
Moss Boss.”
At a civic center that
would double as the ex
terior of a morgue, Moss
surveyed a spot where ex
tras would assemble. “I’ve
tended to think like a di
rector for a while,” she told me, men
tioning that she’d been involved in the
tactile worldbuilding of “Handmaid’s”
since the beginning. When Moss took
up directing, she asked every director
she encountered (Wes Anderson, Taika
Waititi) for advice. Ben Stiller reminded
her not to shortchange herself as an
actor when she needed another take.
But her model was Jane Campion. “I
learned from Jane that it’s O.K. to say,
‘I don’t know,’” Moss told me. She was
talking about her more carefree ap
proach to acting when Whitford walked
by. “I’m just dispensing some wisdom,”
she deadpanned. “You might want to
stick around.”
The two chatted in the snow. “I
learned how a set should be from ‘The
West Wing,’” Moss went on. “Every
one was so professional—knew their
lines, because those lines were insane—
but had fun.”
As casually as Moss talks about act
ing, the results run deep. For “Queen
of Earth,” Perry wrote Moss a mono
logue in which she excoriates a man
she loathes at a dinner table. The lines
are vicious—“You are weak and greedy
and selfish”—and Moss delivered them
in a methodical nearwhisper. A lav
mike was taped near her chest, and
during editing Perry noticed that he
could hear her heartbeat accelerate as
her character released more bile. He
kept it in the film. “She’s changing her
biology as it pertains to the scene,” he
said. “And then can do it again in the
next take.”M
oss has always had a transport
ive imagination. As a child, liv
ing in Laurel Canyon, she would read
“Little House on the Prairie” and pre
tend she lived on a farm. She tended
to an imaginary garden in the back
yard. “I would dig a little hole and put
some gravel or stones in it,
and then I would put a lit
tle stick there,” she recalled.
“I must have read a book
about a garden.”
She comes from a fam
ily of musicians: her fa
ther, Ron, is a jazz trom
bonist and manager, and
her mother, Linda, plays
blues harmonica. (They
are now divorced.) She has
a younger brother, Derek. One of her
earliest memories is of hanging around
backstage at the Blue Note Jazz Club,
in New York. “Musicians would come
over all the time, and everyone would
bring an instrument and play,” she re
called. “And I would dance. It was a
very creative, artistic environment. But
not, like, in a hippie way—in a jazz
way.” When she was five, her mother
put her in ballet classes. “Growing up
in a family of musicians, you weren’t
a dilettante about things,” she said. “If
you had a chosen art form, you took
that seriously.”
Moss told me that her acting career
began when her ballet class put on “The
Sound of Music” and an agent saw her
play Gretl, the littlest von Trapp. She
was soon booking toy and cereal com
mercials. At seven or eight, she got her
first television job, in a Jackie Collins
miniseries called “Lucky Chances,” as
a girl who finds her mother, played by
a young Sandra Bullock, dead in a pool.
She worked steadily as a child actor, in
projects including “Suburban Com
mando” (in which she watches Hulk
Hogan rescue a cat from a tree) and
the TV movie of “Gypsy,” starring Bette
Midler. (Moss played the child version
of Gypsy Rose Lee.)
But her professional life predates
“The Sound of Music.” When she
was five, her godfather, Chick Corea,the famous jazz pianist, cast her in
a music video for a piece he’d com
posed called “Eternal Child.” Corea
was a longtime Scientologist—he’d
once recorded a jazz album based on
an L. Ron Hubbard novel set on a
timetravelling spaceship—and Moss’s
father was his manager. In a nine
teeneighties advertisement that has
made its way online, Corea and Ron
Moss pose at a keyboard, next to the
slogan “Who guarantees the future
of Scientology? WE DO!”
Moss’s parents joined Scientology
before she was born. Her father, who
comes from England, once played in
a jazz band with Ron Miscavige, whose
son, David, is the current head of the
Church. (Ron Miscavige, who died
last year, later published a damning
book about his son, titled “Ruthless.”)
According to an interview that Ron
Moss gave last year, on the occasion
of Corea’s death, he and Corea met
in England, at the Scientology head
quarters in East Grinstead, around the
early seventies. Soon afterward, Ron
moved to L.A. and became Corea’s
tour manager, and they formed a label
together. He later managed Isaac
Hayes, another Scientologist, who
stopped voicing the character of Chef
on “South Park” after an episode that
spoofed the Church.
Moss told me that Corea was “the
first person to see me as an artist, even
at five years old. He treated me the
same as he would if I was his age.”
Geoff Levin, a composer who knew
the Mosses through the Church and
has since left Scientology, recalled see
ing the young Moss, who then went
by Lissa, at the Church’s Celebrity
Centre International, in L.A., and find
ing her strikingly precocious. But that
may have had to do with how Scien
tology views children. Levin said, “In
Scientology, they are ancient beings
that just happen to get in a baby body
that is born to you.”
Moss performed Corea’s “Eternal
Child” in theatres on both coasts; the
video she was in aired on MTV in 1988,
with cameos by Karen Black, Al Jar
reau, and John Travolta—all celebrity
Scientologists. In the video, she ap
pears in a red dress with a lace collar,
then picks up pink ballet shoes and
transports to a barre in a leotard and