Towards the end of the hit television series Mad Men, Elisabeth Moss, as Peggy Olson — the secretary who became an ad-land copywriter and effectively ran the show — was called “easily the most feminist icon of all time” by one magazine. That, though, is old news. Now she is in The Handmaid’s Tale, easily the most talked-about TV programme of the year. An adaptation of Margaret Atwood’s button-pushing 1985 dystopian novel about American life under a totalitarian theocracy, it makes for twitchy viewing.
It does, however, look astounding. The Handmaids are sex servants who occasionally go to the shops, wearing white wimples and ruby-red dresses that stand out like bloodstains. That design was inspired by Caravaggio and Vermeer, Moss tells me, and is only worn by the horrifically subjugated, one of whom is her lead character, Offred. Yet, come Halloween, it will be the costume of choice, a tricky outfit to explain to people at parties who don’t know what The Handmaid’s Tale is.
“Right!” Moss says, laughing, imagining someone as her character, talking to a stranger. “‘Well, I’m a sex breeder. A sexual slave. A fertile woman.’”
We meet in a low room with mirrors on the ceiling that create a feeling of suitably squashed unease, quickly offset by how friendly Moss is. Leaning forward, slumped back, the 34-year-old Californian is lively company. She’s dressed in a dazzling sky-blue jacket, her eyes somehow even brighter. I’d never noticed her eyes on screen, maybe because her roles are so dark. In August she returns in Jane Campion’s Top of the Lake, a second case for her unhappy detective, Robin, this time centred on a Sydney prostitution ring.
The Handmaid’s Tale is set in the near future in Gilead, the name given to what was once the United States by a government of religious fanatics. Episodes cut between the sterile hell of the totalitarian now and the carefree liberalism of a few years ago, which looks like 2015. Back then, Moss’s character had a baby, but the new leaders took her child away and forced her to reproduce for the rulers. An early scene shows Moss being raped by her master (Joseph Fiennes) to the chorus of Onward, Christian Soldiers.
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I suggest nervously that the scene is funny, in a Chris Morris way. “Totally,” Moss agrees. Phew. She takes it as a compliment, but the dark humour is key, and capitalises on her skill at suggesting sparkle beneath an austere surface. She honed it in Mad Men, creating a hinterland as deep as an iceberg; now she brings to her roles the edge of a peak Jodie Foster. They look similar, too. In The Handmaid’s Tale, a wry voiceover constantly refers back to her previous life, while Offred often makes weird faces. “You don’t want to make it so grim that people don’t want to watch,” Moss says. “If it’s just dire, dire, dire, they will be, like, ‘Well, this is a pill I have to swallow.’”
That said, the writer Nimco Ali has tweeted that she couldn’t deal with watching it because it reminded her of Yazidi women and the missing Chibok schoolgirls. Women are victims here, of course, but it is not only about feminism. At one point, three people hang: a priest, a gay man and a doctor with a foetus on his shroud, an abortionist.
“It needed to be balls to the wall,” Moss says proudly, but we are dancing around the obvious. Apologies for another Trump nod, but for many in the US, this series has turned a 32-year-old text into the most politically resonant art of the new administration.
“It’s something we take no joy in whatsoever,” Moss admits of the parallels. But she realised early on it would be “dishonest” to deny they exist. “I wish it was just pure entertainment.” When Atwood wrote the novel, it was “a warning flag”, Moss says, against the type of restrictive ideology that burst the liberal bubble last year. One character says: “We didn’t look up from our phones until it was too late.”
“It’s like anything political. If things go in a better direction, it doesn’t mean you stop. Everyone needs to step up
Yet surely the only people who watch The Handmaid’s Tale are those who have these fears already? Moss nods. “But that doesn’t mean it’s less important to make art that talks about what you believe in. We haven’t fallen into the ditch yet, in my country, but we’re getting way too close.” Is she warned not to talk about politics, given that she may offend half the nation? She laughs and sighs. “First and foremost, things have changed. Five years ago, you may have been able to toe a line, but now I don’t think you can.”
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Can, or should? “I don’t think you should. As a liberal woman and a feminist, I can’t stay silent. But I’m an actress, not a politician. I haven’t been trained to talk about this stuff. I’m probably a lot less intelligent about this than a lot of f****** people, but I had a wake-up call. People actually give a shit what I have to say.”
Of course, as a star of the flirty Mad Men, Moss was asked about feminism a lot, but it was different. “It was, like, ‘Ooh, men were naughty!’ Now it has a serious tone. Mad Men was feminism-lite.” She does seem drawn to such roles, a lone woman among men. “But a woman does exist in a man’s world, very often,” she replies. “In my industry, for sure.”
As a producer, Moss was integral in picking four female directors to make The Handmaid’s Tale. “To change [the numbers], you have to take action.” Do peers do enough? “People do more and more, but it’s like anything political. If things go in a better direction, it doesn’t mean you stop. Everyone needs to step up.” The interview room is covered with posters for films by brilliant directors: Terence Davies, William Friedkin. She picks out Pedro Almodovar. “But they are all men — let’s just make it equal, for Pete’s sake.”
Born in 1982, Moss got her acting break in The West Wing in 1999, playing President Bartlet’s daughter Zoey. Later she landed Peggy in Mad Men and became famous, before a range of diverting stage roles and forgettable films. She is also a Scientologist — always has been, raised as such by her parents. Most don’t realise that, but to many she is part of a dominant creed, similar to the one her hit TV drama challenges. She smiles, very calm, in keeping with past claims that the religion gives her stability.
“Well, I don’t like talking about it,” she says, unsurprisingly, though not rudely. Her smile doesn’t drop. “I’m treading carefully. Avoiding each mine. But any time you have a religion, you can go in a fundamentalist direction. You can take any religion and say they went too far. But [The Handmaid’s Tale] is about bigotry, and part of the problem in Gilead is that people aren’t allowed to practise what they believe. Obviously I have a connection to that.”
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She’s turned that around. “I don’t not understand the question,” she argues, still not prickly, just very, very relaxed. “It’s not, like, ‘You’re out of line!’ It’s just I feel it’s the opposite.”
The big topics continue. She really does pick them. We talk around the gripping new series of Top of the Lake, which includes the desensitising of sex due to porn and its main theme, motherhood. “Because me, not being a mother, but having motherly instincts…” Moss begins, before segueing into postnatal depression and how women are meant to feel like “blossoming goddess mothers, but it’s not always like that”.
Do all her roles have to mean so much? She shakes her head. “I don’t pick them based on wanting to teach a lesson,” she says, as if she has overlooked her own CV. “That’d be boring. I just love dark, complex things.”
Her latest film is a comedy, The Square, directed by Ruben Ostlund, who made the disarming family farce Force Majeure. An art-world satire, it won the Palme d’Or last Sunday. It’s a masterpiece: smart, sick, emotional, hilarious. Moss has a standout scene with a condom. “There were a lot of condoms,” she recalls. It is the role most like the off-screen her: playful and sincere in flip-flopping doses. Her father is a Brit and raised her on Monty Python and Fawlty Towers, and that comedy of awkwardness is very much in Ostlund’s style.
The gallery in the film is shipping in an artwork, the square of the title, in which visitors should walk to interact with others — so daft, it would be a shoo-in for the Turner prize. Its plaque reads: “THE SQUARE IS A SANCTUARY… WITHIN IT WE ALL SHARE EQUAL RIGHTS.” When I suggest those ideals are what The Handmaid’s Tale calls for, Moss gives her broadest grin, delighted, and suggests we create such a space before it’s too late.
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The Handmaid’s Tale is on Channel 4, Sundays at 9pm; The Square is in cinemas from August 25; Top of the Lake starts on BBC2 in August
