THE VISIBLE WOMAN

Elisabeth Moss’s face, which is pale, line-free and animated, reveals everything she wants you to know and little else. Even in the ridiculously dim early evening light of the bar at the Sunset Tower hotel in Los Angeles, her blue eyes are bright with attention. “I find that I’m very, very good at, like, I guess some people would call it ” says Moss, 37, with a laugh and a lilt in her voice that makes that admission sound like an apology. Moss, who introduces herself as Lizzie, has arrived fresh from a meeting with the writers the dystopian Hulu drama that she both produces and stars in. Her shoulder-length, bleached-blonde hair is in a pretty tangle, and she’s wearing a black leather moto jacket, a white t-shirt, and trackpants. “I’m really good at turning it off, going home and texting my friends, having a glass of wine and putting it aside,” she tells me after ordering a Moscow mule and sinking into the cushions around a corner table. “It’s not unconscious. I need to be able to do that to treat my work with joy and enthusiasm.” Anyone who has seen Moss as Peggy Olson, the advertising copywriter who repeatedly crashed into a succession of low glass ceilings on or June, the enslaved procreator–slash–agent of chaos on knows her face and all the quicksilver emotions it conveys. She can communicate more with a raised eyebrow than most people can with a paragraph of dialogue. In Moss’s latest film, a modern retelling of the H.G. Wells sci-fi novel of the same name, that canvas of a face is on full display, panicked and paranoid as she plays a woman terrorised by an abusive ex-boyfriend who no one else can see. It’s worth noting that many of the characters in the Moss oeuvre seem to be fighting against a pervasive destructive masculine presence, but in , this theme is anything but nuanced. “It’s that universal feeling of not being seen, of not having a voice, the fear of being invisible,” she explains. “We live in a patriarchy. If you’re telling a story about a woman, part of it will be about living in that patriarchy.” Moss also has zero fear around playing the anti-hero. “I’ve had to remind people who love June about all who have died either directly because of her or because she has let them die,” she says. “June can be shitty. She can be selfish. She makes the wrong decision all the time. She cheats on her husband. She’s not the best heroine a lot of the time. Then again, she is so human, and so us, and tough and strong, and she does have this love for her daughter. People have many different facets. All the good stories are very murky. Big grey areas are more interesting.”