How Elisabeth Moss Became the Dark Lady of the Small Screen

The actor—who is also a director, a rom-com fan, and a Scientologist—likes to swim in the weird.

Wowzers,” Elisabeth Moss said, peering down at a bloodied corpse made of silicone. It was January, 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, imagines a repressive theocracy that has overthrown the United States and forced women into regimented roles, including Handmaids, who are ceremonially raped and impregnated by their Commanders. The first season, hewing to Atwood’s book, introduced June’s life as Offred, renamed to mark her ownership 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, pummelled Fred into oblivion. The nude silicone body, wheeled out on a metal tray, was his.

Moss, who was raised in the Church of Scientology, is one of the most unconventional 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. But as the show went on—and Peggy morphed from mousy secretary into tart copywriting whiz—she became its stealth heroine, pointing the way to TV’s more female-centric next phase. (Moss received six Emmy nominations.) Before “Mad Men” was over, she starred in Jane Campion and Gerard Lee’s limited series, “Top of the Lake,” a forerunner of such highbrow whodunnits as “Mare of Easttown.” Then came “The Handmaid’s Tale.” If “The West Wing” was liberal America’s alternative to the Bush Administration, “The Handmaid’s Tale,” which premièred in the spring of 2017, midway between Trump’s Inauguration and #MeToo, was timed for the Resistance. Women protesting abortion rollbacks in bonnets and red robes is now a staple of American activism. Moss won her first Emmy for the role.

Elisabeth Moss Would Like You All To Stop Comparing “The Handmaid’s Tale” To Scientology

Elisabeth Moss