by Lena Potts
Elisabeth Moss is special.
Often, when we find actors who manage to pull themes throughout their career, they are doing so because they’ve been pigeonholed or that’s simply their shtick. The Rock, for example, is amazing, and has been amazing at playing versions of the same character on and off screen for my entire life.
Elisabeth Moss has somehow played different but very much the same women for much of her career. She doesn’t seem to be doing it as a gimmick, to be cute, or because she doesn’t have the range- instead, it feels like a purposeful, and, frankly artful selection of pieces. In the same way directors may group their films as a universe or point of view or period, Moss has selected her roles around a fierce core that is central to her image and important to today’s storytelling.
On our screens for over 20 years, Moss’s break came with her recurring role as Zoey Bartlett, the President’s daughter, on The West Wing. She’s had roles in tens of feature films and TV shows, but became the Elisabeth Moss she is today after stealing much of the spotlight throughout Mad Men’s eight year run. In her role as Peggy Olson, she paved her own way through a field steeped in misogyny at a time when female value was thought to be exclusively domestic. By the time Mad Men ended in 2015, people knew that 1) Jon Hamm deserved the Emmy, and 2) Peggy was one of the most important characters of our time.
During her run as Peggy, Moss also starred as Detective Robin Griffin in the superb miniseries Top of the Lake, as her character tries to uncover what has happened to a pregnant 12 year old girl in a mysterious New Zealand lake town. The entire series is haunting and filled with incredible performances, including Peter Mullan and an exhilarating Holly Hunter. But again, it is rooted in the performance Moss gives. [SPOILER ALERT] Robin, is a fierce woman, a brilliant detective, and a survivor of a violent sexual assault. She is messy and makes emotional, sometimes rash decisions, but these complexities never undercut her competence, and the show never doubts her.
Now, she is starring in The Handmaid’s Tale, Hulu’s adaptation of the well-known and adored Margaret Atwood novel (with a 100% Rotten Tomatoes score). Set in a dystopian but eerily possible near future, women have been stripped of many of their basic rights, American society has plunged into religious totalitarianism, and birth rates have declined so dramatically that all fertile women are forced to carry and birth children for the elite as “handmaids”. Offred, Moss’s character, is one of these handmaids, and through her we see glimpses of how we got there. The series takes us through the lives of Offred and the other handmaids, what it means to live without your rights, and just how trying resistance can be. Moss is the heart and soul of the show, and makes the plot feel possible, and even more horrifying for its reality.
For all we know, she could be playing these characters for the same reason The Rock plays most of his- it’s not so much acting as the furthering of an encompassing on and off screen persona. Or she could be entirely different from these characters. Moss has not built much of a celebrity persona about herself, nor does she play into one being built for her. And while her roles have turned her into a critical darling, it’s hard to say that they’ve increased her celebrity. Her social media accounts are sparse and are largely work focused. We don’t see her on magazine covers or their social media equivalents. She gives few interviews, and all are about work. No one talks about who she’s dating or how much weight she’s lost. She was married and divorced to Fred Armisen without much fanfare.
The only personal area she draws public attention to is her feminism. We know, without doubt, that Elisabeth Moss wants to project vocally and passionately her desire to further women’s rights. Her roles dovetail nicely with these politics.
Media depictions of women are, as we know, trash. We don’t need to recount here how unfair they are, how much damage they have done, and how they perpetuate dangerous cycles of disparity and violence. Media depictions of rape and sexual assault can be particularly misleading and harmful. They can sensationalize and use rape for entertainment, Game of Thrones style. They can be very narrow, and only show rapes that include a clear “no”, leaving out the fact that so many survivors are assaulted regardless of having said “no” or not. Trauma is complex, both when it happens and afterward. Moss’s roles in both Top of the Lake and The Handmaid’s Tale, and the strength with which she plays them, have given us depictions of rape and responses to it in many more representative forms. In her hands we’ve seen sexual violence institutionalized and sanctioned, as religiously justified violence, as a product of insidious culture, as pervasive and quiet.
It seems, with what very little public persona she has given us, that she takes these roles on purpose, that they are vital to her. And it’s vital to us that she portray these women and their experiences because they are real, and otherwise not represented. As we all know, representation matters, what we see matters, and as survivors fight for the right to be recognized, as we struggle to find ways to curtail rape culture and raise young people not to hurt one another as we so often have, it is important to see these stories on screen.
It is easy to say, as the critical consensus has, thank goodness for Elisabeth Moss.
The hiccup with Elisabeth Moss is Scientology.
She has been a lifelong practitioner, and has been quoted about the many benefits of the religion on her personal life. After the release of the documentary Going Clear, which uncovered for the masses the human rights violations and general creepiness of the religion, the media took its celebrity believers to task. John Travolta was dragged through the mud. Tom Cruise had already dragged himself, the documentary piled on, and the media nailed his coffin shut for a few years. But Moss, as this Salon article points out, never had to answer for her beliefs, when she probably should have. And while I agree with Salon that Moss’s likeability should not shield her from the public responsibility we so often ask of celebrities, I also love that she hasn’t acted responsibly.
We have male anti-heroes and men we love to hate. We have Justin Bieber, who is a huge douche, but tbh I’d still totally have sex with him. We have Johnny Depp, who maybe possibly beat the shit out of Amber Heard, but is still Jack Sparrow, and they still released the 8000th film in that franchise last week. We don’t cast these men out, and, honestly, we don’t ask much of them either. We care about what we consume from them, both in their public image and their work. But it is much harder to be a human person, a celebrity, and a woman, if you’re going to have faults. In the age of Instagram, image curation is vital to celebrities, particularly female celebrities, in maintaining whatever image they and their teams have built. Think Taylor Swift, think Ariana Grande.
Moss defies this paradigm. As with other people of influence, she has a responsibility to stand up against human rights violations and other evils brought to her attention, particularly if she has been affiliated with them. Especially given her record of ardent feminism and vocal support of women’s rights, it seems a contradictory and self-serving that she hasn’t, and that she won’t. It’s a blemish, and it doesn’t go down smooth.
Elisabeth Moss, like her characters, is flawed. She is as complex a woman in her personal life as the women she chooses to portray on screen. And that is so refreshing when we largely see manicured and PR driven “right ways” to be a woman in the celebrity personas we admire. That it is a more of a challenge to like her “brand” personally because of her affiliation to Scientology is absolutely necessary. It matters how people, particularly marginalized people, who are so often misunderstood, are represented by those who have the power of celebrity. I, for one, am glad to have a complex woman on our screens regularly who doesn’t seem to be playing at, “Celebrities, they’re just like us!”, but who may actually be a hell of a lot like us.
Image credits:
N.d. Rolling Stone. Web. 31 May 2017. <http://www.rollingstone.com/tv/news/elisabeth-moss-on-mad-men-peggy-and-the-end-20140414>.
N.d. Play It Again Dan. Web. 31 May 2017. <https://playitagaindan.wordpress.com/2015/04/21/underappreciated-masterpieces-top-of-the-lake-2013/>.
N.d. GQ. Web. 31 May 2017. <http://www.gq.com/story/elisabeth-moss-handmaids-tale>.
N.d. Cosmopolitan. Web. 31 May 2017. <http://www.cosmopolitan.com/entertainment/books/a9533958/dystopian-books-list-handmaids-tale/>.
