22 THENEWYORKER,M AY 9, 2022
“I know the water is slowly heating up, but I figure
that’s the younger generation’s problem.”• •
tights; later, she returns as an appari-
tion in a mirror, as another young girl
picks up ballet shoes. At the time, a
Los Angeles Times profile of Moss de-
scribed her as a ballet prodigy with a
perfect arabesque. Asked by the writer
what she liked best about dancing, Moss
said, “The lights and the people and
the clapping. I like Chick Corea, and
I like dancing with Chick Corea. And
I like being the Eternal Child.”
According to Scientology records
that have been made public, Moss took
the Hubbard Key to Life Course when
she was eight and achieved the state
of Clear when she was eleven. Although
Moss downplays her religious affilia-
tion publicly, she is part of a small set
of second-generation Hollywood Sci-
entologists, and her religious network
has played a role in her career. Her
manager since the age of ten has been
Gay Ribisi, the mother of the actors
Giovanni and Marissa Ribisi, a prom-
inent Scientology family; when she
was preparing for “Her Smell” and
needed to ask someone about punk
rock, she called Beck, who at the time
was married to Marissa Ribisi. (He has
since denied that he ever “actively pur-
sued” Scientology.)
Moss says that her friends growing
up were mostly other ballerinas, not
the children of Scientologists. As an
adolescent, she acted on shows such
as “Picket Fences” and continued to
dance, attending the School of Amer-
ican Ballet, in New York, and study-
ing at Suzanne Farrell’s summer in-
tensive at the Kennedy Center. At
fifteen, she faced a choice: apply for
year-round ballet programs or pursue
acting. “I remember thinking, I want
to have a career past thirty-five,” she
said. But her ballet training gave her
a sense of rhythm, she said, and an in-
stinct for “how your entire body can
communicate an emotion in a scene,
whether it’s stillness or the opposite
of stillness.” That same year, after
a “cobbled together” education of
homeschooling and tutors, she got her
G.E.D. She knew she wanted to be a
full-time actress: “I was, like, I don’t
know why I need algebra.”
As a teen-ager with gawky features,
Moss began to figure out where she fit
in in Hollywood. “I wasn’t the per-
fect-cheerleader type. I couldn’t get one
of those WB shows to save my fuck-
ing life,” she said. “It was also to do
with my style as an actor, which was
kind of weird, and remains kind of
weird. I was not very good at playing
something straight.” In 1999, she ap-
peared as an institutionalized burn vic-tim in “Girl, Interrupted” and began
her role on “The West Wing,” as Zoey
Bartlet. At her audition, she saw an ac-
tress who looked just like Winnie Coo-
per, from “The Wonder Years.” “I re-
member thinking, Oh, that’s that.
Winnie Cooper’s here. I’m not getting
this part,” she recalled. “And all three
times I read with this man who seemed
really nice and was really good at the
dialogue, and I had no idea who he
was. It was only after I got the part that
I realized it was Aaron Sorkin.”
At nineteen, Moss moved to New
York to act in an Off Broadway play,
“Franny’s Way,” alongside Martin
Scorsese’s daughter Domenica. (The
Times wrote that both actresses “mix
defensive malice and vulnerability.”)
After the run, she moved into an apart-
ment in Stuyvesant Town that she
found on Craigslist and shared with a
fiftysomething man whose name, she
thinks, was either Johnny or Walter.
“He had the living room, which had a
partition, and I had the bedroom, which
had a mattress on the floor,” she re-
called. “He was a substitute teacher, so
he was gone during the day, and I was
nineteen, so I was kind of out all night.”
She stayed in the apartment for three
or four years. In 2003, she starred
in an indie film called “Virgin,” as a
pregnant teen-ager who believes she
is carrying the child of God, and was
nominated for an Independent Spirit
Award. But she was often short on
cash, and Johnny-slash-Walter would
sometimes cover her four-hundred-
dollar rent. She had no backup plan
and no day job. “It was this weird jux-
taposition of being a super tiny bit fa-
mous but then also having absolutely
no money,” she said. “I’d go, ‘I don’t
think I can get another job. They’re
going to be, like, Why is Zoey Bart-
let working at the coffee shop?’”
After years of intermittent roles,
she auditioned for “Mad Men.” She
showed up looking like a “beachy Cal-
ifornia girl”: long blond hair, tanned
skin, skimpy halter dress. “I looked
nothing like Peggy,” she said. But she
got the part. “I just knew who she fuck-
ing was. It felt like putting on the most
comfortable sweater you own. It felt
like a good cocktail.”
In the first season of “Mad Men,”
Peggy is so naïve that she doesn’t re-