When Mad Men, AMC’s 1960s
advertising
drama, began, probably the only person who knew the clueless secretary
with the unflattering bangs would become the show’s hero was its
creator, Matt Weiner. The first episode was Peggy Olson’s first day on
the job, her ears sticking out, her clothes ill-fitting, her ambitions
unformed. But with each season, Mad Men’s own girl Friday has ascended the corporate ladder,
gaining power, sophistication, and better haircuts, only to arrive at
the end of last season in her mentor Don Draper’s chair, finally wearing
the literal (houndstooth) pants.
“In the opening credits, my name is after Jon Hamm’s, who stars as Draper,” recalls Elisabeth Moss,
the 31-year-old actress who plays Peggy. “But when I did the pilot I
was not necessarily in that position. I’m No. 4 on the call sheet. But
Matt put me second in the credits. I guess he knew what was going to
happen.” Don may be the show’s dashing face, but Peggy has always been
its point-of-view character, “our Virgil,” in the words of Hamm,
“leading us through this hellscape of ’60s advertising.”
When the show returns for the first half of its seventh and final
season on April 13, it will be as much Peggy’s story as Don’s. Don is
caught up in his past, his power and pull dissipating in a radically
diversifying world—a man adrift in a future full of Peggy Olsons. As
Peggy has spiffed up and risen, again and again, to the occasion, so
has Moss, who has been nominated for an Emmy for playing Peggy four
times, and on the strength of her skill turned a show about a suave,
tortured anti-hero into one just as much about an earnest, driven
heroine, a broadening of focus not incidental to Mad Men’s well-deserved reputation as one of the best dramas on television. When season five ended with Peggy going to another advertising agency,
the panic among fans was such that Weiner, who guards secrets as
zealously as the NSA—and more effectively—issued a spoiler of his own,
promising Peggy would be back.
As we, the audience, are preparing for a post–Mad Men age,
so is Moss, and she’s much further along than we are, having already
embarked on a series of Peggy-less projects. Last year, she starred in Top of the Lake, Jane Campion’s idiosyncratic mini-series in which she played a troubled New Zealand cop. The two small films she made during the Mad Men hiatus—The One I Love, a mumblecore thriller with Mark Duplass, and Listen Up Philip, in
which she plays a Brooklyn photographer in the midst of a breakup with a
difficult author played by Jason Schwartzman—both made it to Sundance;
the former was purchased by the Weinstein's Radius-TWC.*
Photo: Cass Bird. Black tank dress from
BASE Range; Rings by Jennifer Fisher and Svelte Metals; Safety pin
earring by Loren Stewart; Necklace by Inez & Vinoodh.
For the time being, Moss, who goes by Lizzie, is still most
closely associated with Peggy, so much so that strangers often tell her
how much the character inspired them to change jobs.
TV has many ambitious women, but Peggy stands out among them for
navigating a working world—with glass ceilings, boys’ clubs, and
take-me-seriously work clothes—that feels, despite its period detail,
remarkably contemporary. Peggy is “the one we relate to, the one that’s
us,” Moss says, and the legions of essays and blog posts and tweets
celebrating her extraordinary ability to lean in are proof of her
connection to the audience. (Peggy Olson is easily the most GIF-ed
feminist icon of all time.)
But as Mad Men’s fans continue to produce both Peggy Olson
scholarship and Peggy Olson mash notes, Moss herself has a much less
heady relationship to the character. “I don’t actually work in
advertising in the ’60s. I’m an actor,” she says, laughing. “I’m just a
normal person who worries and stresses about stupid shit. I like to
sleep in. I like sushi. I love what I do. I think acting is super-fun. I
don’t think it’s something super-serious.”
“Peggy has a sense of humor about things,” Weiner says. “But she is not as much fun as Lizzie is.”
Recently, at work, Moss asked her colleagues, “Do you remember
when I used to come in and bring you assholes drinks and leave and that
was my job?
Moss does what she can to minimize these discontinuities,
shielding herself from the vertigo of fame by collapsing her world into
an extremely cozy radius. She rents an apartment in West Hollywood,
newly home to two cats named Ethel and Lucy, and rents another one in
lower Manhattan. When she’s in New York, she rarely leaves a few blocks
in the East Village. When she’s in L.A., she revisits the same places
over and over again. (At the restaurants and hotel bars we went to, she
was greeted with the intimacy of a regular, the well-being of her family
inquired after.) She is very close with her mother and brother, who is
18 months younger. She doesn’t particularly enjoy large parties,
preferring to hang out at work or have dinners or small gatherings with
friends, most of whom are or were her colleagues. She travels with a
stuffed animal. She goes to bed late and sleeps later, if work doesn’t
interfere. She watches lots of TV—Scandal, Parenthood, Nashville, The Good Wife, her Instagram handle references a Real Housewife—and wound down every evening while shooting Top of the Lake by binge-watching The Sopranos. As much as she can, she keeps things simple. When a huge moth flew into her bedroom and landed on a copy of J. K. Rowling’s The Casual Vacancy, Moss just tossed both out the window.
While she is filming Mad Men, Moss spends time on set even
after she’s done with her own work. The cast is very close: “It’s not a
real workplace” is how she puts it. “Base camp,” the area by the hair,
makeup, and actors’ trailers, has been tricked out with a deck that has a roof, couches, and a fire pit, and the cast spends time there, lately playing Heads Up!, an iPhone game.
Moss is the official president of base camp (Hamm is the
“sergeant-at-arms”), and she has gotten extremely good at Hey Mr. DJ, a
Heads Up! category in which the name of a song pops up on the iPhone
screen and all the assembled players have to hum it, vocalize it,
whatever, so long as they don’t use the lyrics, while the person holding
the phone tries to guess the title.
She recently spent a Thursday night on set polishing her
lyricless rendition of Pink’s “Just Give Me a Reason,” and the next
night, at the Sunset Tower Hotel in Hollywood, she asked her table, “Are
we really going to escape tonight without playing Heads Up!?” Seconds
later, she had successfully turned the hotel patio into a living room,
nine of her friends loudly humming “Respect” and “Man in the Mirror,” as
Jessica Alba, Rachel Zoe, Kate Hudson, and Nicole Richie ate inside the
restaurant 200 yards away.
Moss picks me up in her car for a drive to the
beach wearing “beach clothes,” a loud fluorescent-pink-and-green zip-up
hoodie over a short-sleeved peasant blouse, jeans with holes in the
knees, and flip-flops. (“That’s my favorite part of articles,” she says
as I write down the particulars of her outfit. “I always want to know
what they’re wearing. I want to know what Amy Adams wears to lunch.”)
She does not often go to the beach, and she’s anxious about our trip
there, familiar enough with the conventions of celebrity profiles—in
which reporter and subject do activities together—to have overthought
it. “I’ve been stressing about this. I don’t do anything,” she says. “I
don’t go to classes. I hate hiking. I don’t go to flea markets. I would
like to do that stuff but I just don’t do that stuff. I was like, ‘I
guess we’ll go to the beach, because that’s something I would do if I
had time and wasn’t so lazy?’ ”
As we drive down Sunset, she tells me that she thinks it’s her
history as a ballet dancer that’s responsible for this tendency to
burrow. “I have a weird sequestering thing that happened,” Moss says.
“As a dancer, you don’t know a lot about normal everyday life. You grow
up in this little world of ballet, and I feel like that carried on into
my adult life, where I have blinders on to a lot of stuff.” Moss began
dancing when she was 5, shortly before she started acting. She was born
in Los Angeles, her mother a harmonica player, her father a music
manager, and she was raised in what she sheepishly describes as a very
lax academic environment, with her parents putting a serious premium on
the arts. Her first real role came in a before–Sandra
Bullock–was–Sandra Bullock mini-series, and she later played Baby Louise
in a TV version of Gypsy starring Bette Midler—Moss has been
attracted to serious characters from the beginning. But between the ages
of 11 and 14, she focused on ballet.
Photo: Cass Bird. Lurex knit tank dress by Sonia Rykiel.
Then she filmed a Martin Landau movie called The Joyriders,
the first where she “wasn’t just playing someone’s daughter.” She was
so charmed by the whole experience, “not just acting but being a part of
the crew and having the sense of community,” that she decided to focus
on acting. She got her GED at 15. At 17, she read with Aaron Sorkin to
land the recurring part of Zoey Bartlet on The West Wing. At 19,
she moved out of her parents’ house and to New York to appear in a play
and decided to stay, intermittently flying back to L.A. for work. She
shot the pilot for Mad Men within a month of shooting her final episode of The West Wing. Even on Mad Men,
at just 23, Moss stood out as a veteran: Weiner recalls having to film a
close-up in an early episode—the one in which Peggy is tasked with
selling vibrating underwear masquerading as a weight-loss aid—and saying
to Moss, “I don’t know what I need here; I think I need a little bit
more.” She asked him what lens he was on. “Now I joke to her, ‘Set your
face on 7,’ ” Weiner says.
We are almost at the ocean when I bring up Scientology, the
church Moss was raised in. Her affiliation with the church remains the
strange, odd fact of her biography, the thing that does not belong in
her regular-chick story. “I’m not going to talk about it anymore,” she
says firmly. “I said what it meant to me, and anyone can go and look at
that if they want to know what I feel. But now it’s private, off
limits.”
She has previously spoken about how the church is personally
helpful to her, not anti-gay, and “grossly misunderstood by the media.”
But Moss does not talk about Scientology even with friends and seems
very comfortable with how uncomfortable it makes other people. “I would
feel the same way, honestly,” she says. “I think if there was something
that I didn’t know and didn’t understand, I would probably feel as
opinionated. You know how you’re opinionated about when someone breaks
up? Celebrities break up and you just feel like you know what happened?”
She pulls up to a red light on the Pacific Coast Highway, the
water sprawling in front of us. “I’m not sure if I should go left or
right,” she says. We chatter for a few minutes about finding parking,
and as we head into the lot, I note that the ocean conveniently
interrupted my questions about
Scientology. Moss does not miss a beat. “Exactly. Like, ‘Oh, there’s the
ocean. Oops. Sorry, can’t. Look how pretty it is.’ ”
Moss does have a quick and impish streak, most recently on display on the Golden Globe red carpet when she flipped off the “Mani Cam” on live television. She didn’t do it out of spite so much as to see what would happen: She wasn’t sure whether the feed
was live. She can be a little la-di-da naughty like this—not
malicious, but casually willing to risk some trouble for the sake of
fun. At the Sunset Tower, she swiped an ashtray, after some egging on,
just because she’d been wanting to take one home.
In the parking lot, she grabs a hat and coat from the trunk of
her car, which also contains nonperishable groceries from earlier in
the week. It’s mid-February, and she has been working so much on Mad Men she
still has not entirely unpacked from spending Christmas in Chicago with
her extended family. We sit down and I circle back to her point about
celebrity breakups: She was in one. Moss was briefly married to former Saturday Night Live cast
member Fred Armisen, whom she met when Jon Hamm hosted the show. They
were married a year later and broke up eight months after that, in 2010.
Armisen has since described himself as a “terrible husband” on Howard
Stern, a classification to which Moss nods in agreement.
Photo: Cass Bird
“Looking back, I feel like I was really young, and at the time I
didn’t think that I was that young,” Moss says. “It was extremely
traumatic and awful and horrible. At the same time, it turned out for
the best. I’m glad that I’m not there. I’m glad that it didn’t happen
when I was 50. I’m glad I didn’t have kids. And I got that out of the
way. Hopefully. Like, that’s probably not going to happen again.”
Their breakup made it into the tabloids, an eye-opening
experience for her. “I always knew that the stuff that you read is not
true, but when I was in the situation and you really, actually read
things that you apparently said or did that are 100 percent made up …
It’s just the strange, simple thing of, that’s your heart they’re
talking about, and it just … it sucks,” she says. But this unpleasant
brush with the tabloids has not stopped her from occasionally reading
them. “I’m not perfect in that way,” she admits. “I enjoy a little
gossip. I like looking at photos of celebrities going to Starbucks.”
As the end of Mad Men looms—in late March, she goes back
to film the final seven episodes, though those won’t air until
2015—she’s as interested in working in film as in TV, because movies
are less of a time commitment. And she’s not specifically looking to
raise her profile. “Nobody, unless you’re an asshole, should sit around
thinking, I want to be more famous and win more awards,”
she says. “That’s a horrible person.” Even so, Moss finds herself with
more pull, and more fame, than she’s ever had before. “I had to actually
have that moment of observing that I have to read the whole script and
decide whether or not I want to do this movie, because if I do it, the
movie will get made, and if I don’t do it, the movie won’t get made,”
she says. “That’s new.”
On the beach, her eyes extremely pale against the ocean, Moss remembers playing Catch Phrase not so long ago with the cast of The One I Love, and
her own name came up as one of the answers. “It was the most exciting
moment ever,” she says. Then she shrugs. “It’s come up four times since.
Now they’re like, ‘You.’ And I’m like, ‘Elisabeth Moss.’ ”
*This article appeared in the March 10, 2014 issue of New York Magazine.
*A previous version of this article said The One I Love was purchased by the Weinsteins; it was purchased by their boutique label, Radius-TWC.
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