Elisabeth Moss makes the decision to speak worth watching. We rate her most highly when patient writing lets her build a character gradually; the familiar casting as a woman under pressure need not be the limit.
Fi1m perspective
Elisabeth Moss makes listening look like work. In Mad Men (2007), her Peggy Olson watches and weighs what she hears, and we can see her deciding how much to say. We were absorbed by Peggy even when she was silent, because the effort of choosing what to say was so clear. It is a precise performance, without the fuss that can make restraint look like an actor waiting to be noticed.
Matthew Weiner's series gives her the time to build that performance across a long character arc. Peggy begins as a secretary in a 1960s advertising agency, and Moss makes her ambition legible without asking us to understand her completely. Christina Hendricks's Joan Holloway has practised assurance; January Jones's Betty Draper has a stiffness that makes her unhappiness hard to dismiss. Moss's watchfulness is equally specific. These performances help us forgive the series its occasional smugness about the past, though it remains a fault worth acknowledging.
That breakthrough was followed by Top of the Lake (2013), with director Jane Campion, and the lead role of June Osborne in The Handmaid's Tale (2017). On the latter, Moss also produced and directed episodes, extending her work beyond acting. Her film work includes the lead role of Cecilia Kass in the horror-thriller The Invisible Man (2020). The recurring emphasis on women under pressure suits her precision, though we would welcome more parts that do not require her to endure quite so much.
Taika Waititi's Next Goal Wins (2023) offers a comic change of pace, but little reason to make it the next stop. Moss plays Gail, one of the people who send Michael Fassbender's coach to the Pacific. The film is kind and intermittently funny, but its attention stays with the coach when the team would make a better subject. For a sense of what she can do with time and patient writing, start with Peggy.
Biography
Elisabeth Moss is an American actor and producer. Born on 24 July 1982 in Los Angeles, California, she began acting in the early 1990s.
She first gained recognition playing Zoey Bartlet in the NBC series The West Wing (1999–2006). Wider recognition came for her role as Peggy Olson in the AMC series Mad Men (2007–2015). She won two Primetime Emmy Awards and two Golden Globe Awards for her performance as June Osborne in the Hulu series The Handmaid's Tale (2017–present), which she also produced.
Her film credits include Girl, Interrupted (1999), Get Him to the Greek (2010), Us (2019), The Invisible Man (2020) and Next Goal Wins (2023), in which she played Gail. She received a Tony Award nomination for her Broadway role in The Heidi Chronicles.
