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alize she’s pregnant until she goes into
labor. Moss brought an uncanny, even
creepy quality to the character which
added to the show’s gelid mystique. In
one scene, she tells her condescend-
ing supervisor, Joan, “I just realized
something. You think you’re being
helpful.” Moss delivered the line in a
slow whisper, like an alien observing
an earthling. She had little sense of
how Peggy would evolve. “The first
season, I spent a lot of time sitting
outside an office,” she recalled. “I’d be
behind the door on a typewriter. And
the door would close, and I’d pull out
a gossip magazine, and when I heard
the scene was ending I’d put it back
and the door would open, and I’d be
there pretending to type again.” Her
first indication that Peggy was des-
tined for something greater was when
the creator, Matthew Weiner, showed
the cast the opening credits, and she
saw that her name was second, after
Jon Hamm’s.
I
n 2008, Hamm hosted “Saturday
Night Live,” and Moss made a
cameo in a “Mad Men” sketch. That
night, she met Fred Armisen, a cast
member. Three months later, they got
engaged, and they were married within
a year. “I was twenty-seven years old,
and I was young, and things happened
for reasons that I believed in at the
time,” she told me. They split after
eight months. Not long afterward,
Moss told the Post, “One of the great-
est things I heard someone say about
him is, ‘He’s so great at doing imper-
sonations. But the greatest imperson-
ation he does is that of a normal per-
son.’ To me, that sums it up.” Since
then, the story of what happened be-
tween them has played out cryptically
in the press: Armisen admitting he
was a “terrible husband,” Moss saying
that the marriage was “traumatic.” In
2015, Armisen told Marc Maron, on
his podcast, that he’d been caught up
in the fantasy of dating the girl from
“Mad Men.” “I have a problem with
intimacy, where, all of a sudden, there’s
a real person there,” he told Maron.
He added that he tended to sabotage
relationships with infidelity.
When I read these comments to
Moss, she said, evenly, “I would say,
good for him for being open about that.
He said more to Marc Maron than he
said to me at the time.” She went on,
“I definitely learned that you should
make sure you know somebody before
you marry them.” Her best friend, Susan
Goldberg, who was an AMC execu-
tive during “Mad Men,” told me, “It
was rough. One of the things Lizzie
says, which I think is true, is everyone
is into Hollywood breakups. We all get
Us Weekly when we’re getting on the
plane, so she understands the interest
behind it. But then, when it’s you, it’s
not that fun.”
In Season 5 of “Mad Men,” Peggy
gets another job and gives notice to
her mentor, Don Draper. When Moss,
shooting the scene, held out her hand
for a handshake, Hamm surprised her
by kissing it and not letting go, and
the camera caught Moss choking up.
She kept only one costume from the
show, the purple dress she wears in
that scene. “I don’t know if it was my
favorite scene to shoot, but it was the
most real,” she told me. “Because I was
just about to go do ‘Top of the Lake,’
and I had this feeling of leaving the
nest, and that I was going to go off
and try something new.”
Among the “Mad Men” cast, Moss
has had the most adventurous post-
show career. Josephine Decker, who
directed “Shirley,” told me, “She’s drawn
to really complicated material.” But
Decker admitted that there was “an
ocean of Lizzie” that remained enig-
matic to her: “I never talked to her
about the Scientology thing, but I’m
really curious about it.”
T
he Scientology thing. Even the
casual Moss fan has to grapple
with cognitive dissonance: what’s an
approachably cool pop-culture femi-
nist icon doing in an organization that
its defectors, among other critics, de-
scribe as a dangerous cult? It’s tempt-
ing to imagine that she’s just cultur-
ally Scientologist, like a Jew who goes
to temple only on Yom Kippur. And
yet, according to a Web site that tracks
“service completions” listed in Scien-
tology magazines, in 2017 Moss did a
Purification Rundown, a detox treat-
ment that involves prolonged heat ex-
posure and ingesting large quantities
of niacin.
When I brought up Scientology,
Moss was Zooming from her trailer
in Toronto, sitting on the floor. In my
time with her, she had been friendly
and accessible. “I don’t want to come
off as being cagey,” she said. “If you
and I met, just hanging out as friends,
I’m, like, an open book about it.” But,
she added, “I don’t want people to be
distracted by something when they’re
watching me. I want them to be see-
ing the character. I feel like, when ac-
tors reveal too much of their lives, I’m
sometimes watching something and
I’m going, Oh, I know that she just
broke up with that person, or, I know
that she loves to do hot yoga, or what-
ever it is.”
I told her that people are already
distracted by it—that they don’t al-
ways know how to hold the public and
the private Lizzies in their mind. Smil-
ing, she replied, “People can obviously
hold in their mind whatever they want
to, and I can’t control that. If it’s not
that, it’s going to be something else.”
She smeared on lip balm and contin-
ued, “It’s not really a closed-off reli-
gion. It’s a place that is very open to,
like, welcoming in somebody who
wants to learn more about it. I think
that’s the thing that is probably the
most misunderstood.”
One of the tenets of Scientology is
that the mind is divided into two parts:
the analytical, which we use to make
conscious choices, and the reactive,
which holds on to trauma and pain,
and must be vanquished in order to
“go Clear.” It seems like an odd fit for
Moss, who is drawn to performing
trauma. “Well,” Moss said, “I think it’s
more about those traumatic incidents,
or those moments of pain, whether it’s
emotional or physical, holding you back
from being who you are now.” I asked
how Scientology had helped her as she
grew up. She scratched her neck, think-
ing, and said, “Communication is some-
thing that I obviously use so much, not
