Few actors know TV like Elisabeth Moss. The 39-year-old once dubbed “the queen of peak TV” has been a small-screen staple since she was about eight years old. She stopped by classics ranging from Picket Fences and Animaniacs to The Practice as a young guest star. Into adulthood, she seamlessly transitioned from one era-defining hit to another: as the president’s college-age daughter Zoey Bartlet on The West Wing; as secretary turned copywriter Peggy Olson on Mad Men; and as Gilead resistance leader June Osborne on The Handmaid’s Tale. Now, while that show is in production for its fifth season, Moss has got Shining Girls, a trippy thriller on Apple TV+ generating more rave reviews for its star.
“I certainly never anticipated having that track record that you speak of,” she tells me on this week’s Little Gold Men (listen to the full interview below). “I just—I love television. That’s the only thing I can kind of say. I watch a lot of stuff. Good television very much influenced me as an actor growing up. Claire Danes doing My So-Called Life was the thing—when I was like 13, 14—that showed me, oh, my God, you can act like that on TV.”
Now with two Emmys under her belt, as both actor and producer, Moss has emerged as a full-blown power player in the medium, developing projects from the ground up and adding directing credits to her résumé. You’d think that the acting tests presented by projects like Mad Men or Handmaid’s, both of which feature massive story arcs and command uncommon nuance, would keep Moss content. Indeed, for many actors, they’re once-in-a-lifetime roles. But the creative thrill of a rich, intense, exhausting character only fuels her to take things a step further. “I’m never looking to make it easier on myself,” she says. “For me at this point, it’s more about how do I make it harder? How do I find something that I haven’t done yet?”
Loosely adapted from the Lauren Beukes novel, Shining Girls presented that opportunity. Set in ’90s Chicago, Moss plays Kirby, an archivist at the Chicago Sun-Times trying to get her reporting career back on track. Recovering from an attack by an unknown assailant years earlier, Kirby lives with her highly dysfunctional mother (Amy Brenneman) and experiences disorienting visions of alternating realities, or dimensions, or eras, or something—though this is less a symptom of her trauma, we learn, than the key to the mystery of what happened to her. The man who nearly took Kirby’s life appears to be a time-hopping serial killer named Harper (Jamie Bell), and as he settles on the identity of his next victim, we’re thrust into a fascinating, confounding cat-and-mouse game.
In the eight-episode season’s first half, particularly, Kirby must stay quiet. Alongside us, the audience, she gathers details of the elusive killer. Moss has gained esteem in movies for horror roles like those in The Invisible Man and Us, but this felt distinct from those too, as Moss found Kirby’s audience-proxy quality suitably unusual, fresh, and difficult to play. “People are going to think she’s crazy. That was the hardest thing: registering that, showing to the audience that there was some feeling or emotion about something changing, but not being able to say anything,” Moss says. “That happens over and over and over and over again, so the other challenge is how do I keep doing it? How do I keep rediscovering this? How do I keep having this thing happen and not make it boring?”
In Moss’s hands—her extraordinarily expressive eyes, her perceptiveness, her adeptness at portraying women who gradually find their voice, from Peggy to June—it’s never boring. The show can be hard to follow, by design, but the scripts stay snappy; the direction, split between TV vets Michelle MacLaren and Daina Reid and Moss herself, establishes a clear, compelling visual language. In an era of streaming bloat and consolidation, it feels about the furthest thing from algorithm-driven.
That’s how Moss likes it. She pays close attention to how networks and studios evaluate content. With Shining Girls, created by Silka Luisa, Moss joined a show from its very inception, when it hadn’t yet found a home, for the first time. (She signed on to produce and star in Handmaid’s after Hulu had landed the series.) She knew exactly what to look for as the team shopped the potential series around town, in a brave new era for the medium that’s been her home her whole career. “Apple TV+ felt like it had this hunger and it had this need for new material—and I have found that pretty much everything I’ve done has been at a home at a time when that was the case,” Moss says.
She’s right: Mad Men was AMC’s first prestige breakout; ditto Handmaid’s for Hulu; and the lauded crime drama Top of the Lake for the Sundance Channel. “They’re open to new ideas because [they’re new],” Moss continues. “They’re not trying to chase the previous success that they just had. They’re not trying to copy what has worked for them. They are looking for a new idea. Because of that, they’re a bit braver, a bit bolder, and willing to take a little bit of a risk.”
The Handmaid’s Tale’s showrunner Bruce Miller put it more succinctly to me last year: “Every show she fucking touches goes on forever.”
Perhaps because Moss grew up on sets, she knows how they should run. More responsibility has come naturally to her. “Lizzie is a very sunny leader, and everybody takes their cues from that,” Miller says. Moss began directing for her Hulu flagship last year, and is behind the camera again for the upcoming fifth season (which is filming as we chat). “It wasn’t that big of a leap for me to start directing on [The Handmaid’s Tale] because I’m so involved in everything on the show,” she says. “It felt like a very natural transition to make—sort of a side step, rather than a big leap forward.” Not quite the case with Shining Girls, which was shot nonsequentially like a film—necessary, given all the reality-shifting going on—with MacLaren, Reid, and Moss operating like a filmmaking team. (Moss directs the fifth and seventh episodes.)
“It was hard because it was a new show, it was a new tone, it was a new world we were building, it was new people I was working with,” Moss says. “I was prepping and directing the entire shoot. I never had the 21 days of prep or whatever, and then you start shooting, and then you’re done. I was literally like prepping, prepping, prepping, shoot, shoot, shoot, prep, prep, prep, shoot, shoot, shoot, throughout the entire season. Just keeping track of everything was like trying to figure out time travel. It was as difficult as quantum physics!”
If you’ve seen even one episode of Shining Girls, juggling this workload while inhabiting such a raw, emotional lead role would seem…unhealthy? Insane? Impossible? Yet the actor does some of her best work here, guiding viewers through a horrific narrative maze with a masterly combination of precision and intuition. Moss believes that directing—as in, literally directing on the same days she’s acting—makes her a better actor, in fact. “When I’m acting, I don’t necessarily do research. I’m not a method actor…I’m very instinctive,” she says. “When I hit an episode that I’m directing, I actually know so much more about what I’m supposed to be doing as an actor. I never thought it’d be like that.”
As Miller was gearing up for season five of Handmaid’s last year, he told me he witnessed his star only getting better: “Elisabeth Moss is only becoming more interesting as an actor, and she’s directing now—I feel like the show could not be in better hands in terms of someone to carry you through.”
Moss is working a lot right now. The pandemic exacerbated her already strenuous schedule, as delays in production on the fourth season of Handmaid’s made it so she’d either have to immediately jump to filming Shining Girls—another very heavy undertaking—or leave it behind entirely. Inevitably, she delved right in, jumping from one fictional nightmare to another. “I didn’t want to lose the opportunity,” she says. “But it was really intense.”
Not the easiest way to work, but quite clearly, Moss has made this something of a habit—at least partly by choice. “The biggest challenge is just looking for things that continue to challenge me,” Moss says with a laugh. If it keeps resulting in work like this, it’s a good problem to have.
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