Margaret Atwood: ‘She’s ahead of everyone in the room’

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As excitement mounts for The Testaments, the sequel to The Handmaid’s Tale, we talk to publishers and fellow writers about the great novelist

Johanna Thomas-Corr

Sun 1 Sep 2019 09.00 

The hoopla around the launch of Margaret Atwood’s The Testaments is more reminiscent of the unveiling of an iPhone or something Pokémon-related than that of a mere book. On the evening of 9 September, 400 people will gather outside the doors of Waterstones’ Piccadilly store in London for the midnight release of the sequel to The Handmaid’s Tale, her dystopian novel-turned-feminist touchstone-turned-meme-machine.

Gwendoline Christie on Playing the ‘Complete Opposite’ of Brienne of Tarth

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Gwendoline Christie plays a character quite different from Brienne of Tarth in “Top of the Lake: China Girl.”CreditSundanceTV/See-Saw Films

Gwendoline Christie on Playing the ‘Complete Opposite’ of Brienne of Tarth

By JENNIFER VINEYARD

SEPT. 6, 2017

If Jane Campion’s first season of the crime drama “Top of the Lake” seemed remote and somber to some, the second season, “Top of the Lake: China Girl” has more of a sense of humor, even when delving into the darker recesses of life. (In this case, migrant sex workers, institutionalized misogyny, mental illness and more.) In the second season, which begins Sunday on Sundance, Elisabeth Moss’s detective Robin Griffin, who returns home to Australia after time in New Zealand, is assigned an overeager assistant, played by “Game of Thrones” star Gwendoline Christie.

Elisabeth Moss / An Ode to Mad Men's Peggy Olson / TV's Most Relatable Feminist

The Evolution of Peggy Olson 

(Mad Men Supercut)

An Ode to Mad Men's Peggy Olson: TV's Most Relatable Feminist

Eliana Dockterman
Mar 10, 2014

Over the last five seasons of Mad Men, we have watched Elisabeth Moss' Peggy Olson go from apologizing to Don Draper to sitting in his chair. Surprised by her initial success as a copywriter, Peggy slowly grew into her talent, eventually realizing that Don's approval wasn't everything and demanding that she be respected for her work. More than any other character on the show, Peggy has grown and changed, and on April 13—when the seventh and final season premieres—she will adjust to finally being in a position of real power.

The 50 best films of 2018 in the UK / No 11 / The Square

The 50 best films of 2018 in the UK: No 11 – The Square 

Ruben Östlund turns art world satire into performance-art cinema

The Force Majeure director returns with a thrillingly weird study of an art gallery director whose life goes into meltdown after his mobile phone is stolen

Cannes 2017 / Ruben Östlund wins Palme d'Or for The Square

Peter Bradshaw
Friday 19 May 2017

R

uben Östlund’s sprawling and daringly surreal satire The Square turns a contemporary art museum into a city-state of bizarre, dysfunctional and Ballardian strangeness. It is a place where one important person’s guilt infects an entire society with a creeping nervous breakdown, at once intensified and yet camouflaged by a notional belief in aesthetic nonconformism and provocative performance art. This movie really brings some gobsmackingly weird and outrageous spectacle, with moments of pure showstopping freakiness. Eventually it loses a bit of focus and misses some narrative targets which have been sacrificed to those admittedly extraordinary set pieces. It doesn’t have the pure weapon-like clarity of Östlund’s previous film Force Majeure. But it sets out to make your jaw drop. And it succeeds.

Like Force Majeure, it centres on a mobile phone. Christian (Claes Bang) is the well-heeled director of a contemporary art museum: the very epitome of a stylish European media professional and man about town. He wants and needs his gallery to make a splash and is persuaded by his PR team that what is needed is something provocative, unusual, challenging and performance-related, something that could generate controversy on social media. He hits on an idea called The Square, an enclosed space in which people are told to behave responsibly.

Whatever that means, Christian is deeply shocked when his phone and wallet are stolen in the square in front of the museum in a theatrically cunning pickpocket scam which is far more ingenious and effective than any performance art in his museum. Infuriated, he uses his “find my phone” app to track down his handset and, in a weird mood of aggressive bravado, sets out to take revenge which brings a horrible blowback.

Christian affects to be amused by the thieves’ daring and his elaborately suppressed humiliation and rage seems to be displaced into the workplace; it seems to find its way into the cultural water-supply. A poisoned-herd strangeness is all about. He has a sexual adventure with a TV interviewer called Anne (Elisabeth Moss), who chats him up at the museum’s season-opener party by impersonating the person with Tourette’s who had disrupted the museum’s onstage discussion with a famous artist, Julian, played by Dominic West.

Their eventual liaison is soured by a tense argument over a condom and by a strange pet that Anne keeps on her apartment – a pet which is to find a nightmare echo in a showpiece performance artist that the museum is promoting. Eventually, Anne’s post-sex confrontation of the commitment phobe Christian takes place in the museum, next to an installation-display showing a teetering pile of stacked chairs - and it is as if their toe-curlingly squirmy argument is all part of the show.

And most excruciating of all is the grand formal dinner that the museum puts on for all its biggest celebrities and wealthiest patrons. The star of the show is a performance artist called Oleg, someone who pretends to be an ape. The post-dinner entertainment will be provided by Oleg who will clamber into the dining hall – grunting and scratching and hooting and maybe poking the diners – and the guests in all their finery will naturally be amused by the resulting Darwinian insights. But Oleg has an intense method-style commitment to his act and it gets out of control. (He is played by the American actor and movement expert Terry Notary, who contributes motion-capture performances to the Planet of the Apes films.)

The ape/dinner sequence really is a cold-sweat-inducing theatre of cruelty and fear: a Stanford Experiment in accepting public humiliation. Östlund may have been inspired by Roy Andersson or maybe Lars Von Trier. There is a drop of Buñuel there too – but Östlund’s own signature is plain. This is high wire cinema.

THE GUARDIAN

Peggy Olson / More than just a survivor

Peggy Olson

More than just a survivor

With the long-awaited fifth season beginning next week, Guardian writers meet the actors who play their favourite characters in the show

Kira Cochrane

Wednesday 21 March 2012 20.00 GMT

 Elisabeth Moss as Peggy Olson. Photograph: Frank Ockenfels/AMC

From the moment she read the Mad Men pilot, Elisabeth Moss fell hard for her character, Peggy Olson, attracted by her "delicious complications". Peggy was an ingenue entering a terrifying, towering new world, "and I loved the fact," says Moss, "that she was this really naive, inexperienced, wide-eyed woman – she didn't even know how to use a typewriter – and then, at the end of the pilot, she sleeps with one of her bosses!"

It could have been the start of a tired story – young woman sleeps her way to the top. But Peggy is subtle, confounding, surprisingly strong; someone who uses her ideas rather than her sexuality to get ahead, and exhibits exemplary cool when the two collide. One of her earliest successes came when she was given vibrating exercise pants to test, noticed their surprisingly stimulating effect, and suggested they be sold as a stealthy sex toy, the Rejuvenator. The idea led straight to a promotion.

Peggy is the quiet, mousy Catholic woman who demands her own office. She's the character for whom the word square sometimes seems to have been invented, who declares to her colleagues: "I'm Peggy Olson, and I want to smoke some marijuana." She is the secretary turned stunningly sharp advertising creative who saves the company when it teeters.

And she also often seems the only character set not just to survive the 1960s, but thrive. Some of the other characters, says Moss, "have lived a lot of their lives, and they're not changing their behaviour and habits. But Peggy doesn't know what she will be. She hasn't become the person she is going to be for the rest of her life." (The other notable exception is Sally Draper, who I like to imagine becoming a strident student feminist in the 1970s, fomenting revolution and thus reuniting her parents in a frenzy of shared horror.)

While Peggy's boss Don Draper is on an alarming downward spiral, "she's moving up", says Moss, "and they're passing each other on the way". Their bond is intense, with both nursing dark secrets. Moss's favourite moment came in an episode from the fourth series, called The Suitcase, when Don asked Peggy whether she ever thought about the baby she had after that pilot-episode liaison with colleague Pete. "I try not to," she replied, "but then it comes up out of nowhere." She paused. "Playgrounds." "To me," says Moss, "that one word, 'playgrounds', is my favourite line ever, because it sums up exactly what this person's experience has been with the baby she gave away."

Peggy is a still point amid a welter of trouble, whisky and pills, and one of the joys is in seeing her relationships develop: her often testy interaction with office manager Joan; the uncomfortable frisson between her and Pete – the boss she slept with who is no longer her boss. Peggy is an everywoman, and the epitome of feminism, says Moss, and she is outdoing her colleagues, while remaining essentially good.

Will she take Don's job? Moss laughs. "I have no idea," she says, "but I don't think she wants it. I think she wants her own job, her own life, her own power." If she carries on like this, she'll get it.

Kira Cochrane

THE GUARDIAN

‘Top of the Lake: China Girl’ / Jane Campion on Her ‘Ovarian’ Series

Elisabeth Moss, Gwendoline Christie and the director Jane Campion on the set of “Top of the Lake: China Girl

‘Top of the Lake: China Girl’: Jane Campion on Her ‘Ovarian’ Series

By JENNIFER VINEYARDSEPT. 12, 2017

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This interview contains spoilers for the entire season of “Top of the Lake: China Girl.”

The legality of prostitution and commercial surrogacy, the exploitation of women involved in both — in the end, “Top of the Lake: China Girl” explored those issues more than it explored the crime that opened the series. By the final two episodes on Tuesday, the central investigation of this six-part installment had gotten murkier and murkier, as the conflicts of interest compounded for detective Robin Griffin (Elisabeth Moss) and her partner, Miranda Hilmarson (Gwendoline Christie). But this series from the filmmaker Jane Campion was more about poetic imagery and gender politics than it was about police work. Ms. Campion explained her take on those issues, the input sex workers had on the story and the series finale.

Elisabeth Moss on life after Mad Men / ‘I don't take acting that seriously. I'm a Valley girl’

Elisabeth Moss
Photo by Van Sarki

‘I don't take acting that seriously. I'm a Valley girl’: Elisabeth Moss on life after Mad Men

From Mad Men to High-Rise, the actor has made her mark playing earnest, tightly wound women. So how come she’s known as the class clown?


Tom Shone
Saturday 12 March 2016 09.00 GMT

Elisabeth Moss gets people coming up to her all the time and asking how she’s doing. Is she sad Mad Men ended? Was it hard? The last day of shooting was, she tells them. The producers saved all the scenes in the ending montage until the very end, so all the actors would be there that day. “It was like, ‘All right, so and so is up’ and everyone would trudge to set and two more actors would wrap. You would be crying. Walk away. Weep some more. ‘All right, it’s Vinny [Kartheiser]now. Let’s go,’ and everybody would go. It happened six, seven times that day. I left and I went home. I felt proud. We had wrapped. We were done. Then, almost a year later, it starts airing and all of a sudden everyone is asking you about it again, and everyone is going through their own cathartic experience of it ending. You are going, ‘Right. OK. I’ve got to get back there.’ I had done four movies since then, and I was doing a Broadway play at the time. They were going through their own grieving process. You are like, ‘I know. It is awful. It is sad. Right. It is reallysad…’”

Elisabeth Moss

Elisabeth Moss interview: The Mad Men actress talks reunion, theatre and women in Hollywood

Mad Men might be over yet Moss’s career is anything but

James Mottram
Friday 29 May 2015 15:00 BST

Life after Mad Men might seem like a daunting prospect. One of the defining television shows of the past decade, after the final episode unspooled recently, you could forgive its stars for worrying about where next.

Not, though, if you’re Elisabeth Moss. The blonde haired, blue-eyed actress, who played the glass ceiling-shattering ad exec Peggy Olson, has just finished a run on Broadway in a revival of Wendy Wasserstein’s The Heidi Chronicles. It left her with glowing reviews, a Tony nomination and the “re-assuring” feeling that Peggy isn’t the last meaningful character she’ll ever play.

Margaret Atwood and Elisabeth Moss on the Urgency of The Handmaid’s Tale

Portrait of Elisabeth Moss and Margaret Atwood shot at the Time Inc. Photo Studios in New York,
March 18, 2017. Ruven Afanador for TIME. 

Margaret Atwood and Elisabeth Moss on the Urgency of The Handmaid’s Tale

Eliana Dockterman
Apr 12, 2017

Margaret Atwood wrote The Handmaid’s Tale, a dystopian novel about a society with a plummeting birth rate, in 1984. In the book, a totalitarian American regime strips women of their rights and forces those who are fertile to become “handmaids” to bear children for wealthy men and their barren wives.

Atwood challenged herself to only include events in the book that had happened in history. The result was a tale about the future that can, at turns, feel all too contemporary. The story includes an environmental crisis, restrictions on abortion, marches for women's rights and Americans fleeing to Canada.

 Elisabeth Moss starring in The Handmaid’s Tale. Photograph: MGM/Hulu

Elisabeth Moss: the actress whose very presence is a guarantee of quality

The new television adaptation of The Handmaid’s Tale is further evidence that the Mad Men star has a talent and range few others can match

Sarah Hughes
Sunday 21 May 2017 00.05 BST

W

hen the idea of a television adaptation of Margaret Atwood’s feminist classic, The Handmaid’s Tale, was mooted, the key phrase attached was “with Elisabeth Moss playing the lead”. The 34-year-old’s involvement was a small but clear signal of reassurance to fans of the source material: this was an adaptation to trust.

Next Sunday, British fans will get a chance to judge whether their faith was well placed as The Handmaid’s Tale arrives on Channel 4. In the US, the series has been rapturously received, hailed by the New York Times as “unflinching, vital and scary as hell”.

The biggest plaudits, however, were saved for Moss, who plays Offred, the title’s handmaid and a woman reduced by a repressive and patriarchal society into sexual enslavement, her old name removed, her new one the signifier of her owner, making her literally Of-Fred. The Boston Globe was impressed: “With The Handmaid’s Tale, Moss establishes herself as one of TV’s best dramatic actresses.”

In truth, she’d done that already. Twice. As Peggy Olson, the dowdy Catholic secretary turned go-getting copy chief on Mad Men, Moss became the no-nonsense heroine for a generation of cable TV watchers. Then, with Mad Mencoming to an end, Moss ensured she would not be consumed by the role that defined her.

Elisabeth Moss as Peggy Olson in Mad Men
Photograph: Jaimie 

Going to New Zealand, she took the lead in Jane Campion’s bleak, bruising Top of the Lake, a dark, dense story about a violent, closed-off community, which returns for a second series this summer. Moss will again play troubled detective Robin Griffith, with Campion full of praise for her star: “She does a very Elisabeth Moss thing, which is… show strength and vulnerability at once, and also mystery.” Mad Men creator Matthew Weiner was more succinct, stating in a Guardian profile that the only two things you need to know about Moss were that she “never gives a bad take and is a rubbish drinker”. Small wonder New York magazine recently named her “the Queen of Peak TV”.

The down-to-earth and outwardly easy-going Moss prefers to play down the praise. “I wish I was super-serious, anguished. I see those actors and I am like, oh God, they are so cool and they seem so interesting,” she said. “I don’t take acting that seriously. I love my work but I do not think that I am saving the world... I am a Valley Girl.”

She wasn’t entirely joking, although beneath the sunny exterior lurks a more complicated soul. She was born in Los Angeles, California, in 1982 and grew up in Laurel Canyon. Her British father, Ron, was a jazz musician and music manager, her American mother, Linda, a harmonica player in blues bands. She and her younger brother, Derek, were raised in a relaxed environment where the arts had more value than a traditional education.

“My earliest memories are at the Blue Note in New York or backstage at different theatres or different clubs,” she told the Guardian. “We grew up with musicians coming over jamming. We had tons of instruments. So holidays were always like, 50 people would come over and there would be a jam session with everyone playing jazz. When I was 12 I didn’t know about Nirvana or Oasis or any of those people. I was listening to Ella Fitzgerald and Gershwin.”

There was, however, a strange wrinkle in this idyllic picture of bohemian freedom – the family were Scientologists and Moss, raised in the church, remains in it today. “I feel it has given me a sanity and a stability that I’m not sure I would necessarily have had,” she told the Times in 2010. In recent years, perhaps mindful of reputation (hers and the church’s), she has become more reticent about her religion: “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.”

If Scientology and music were two crucial poles of her upbringing, the third, and in some ways most important, was ballet. As a child, she pursued dual careers, taking roles in commercials and made-for-TV movies while training as a dancer. At 15, she chose acting, noting it was the easier option. It was certainly the right one. By 17, she was playing the daughter of the president (Martin Sheen) in The West Wing; by 19, she had moved to New York to star in a play; at 23, having already been acting professionally for more than a decade, she was cast as Peggy in Mad Men.

“In my mind, there was something far more difficult than acting, which was either ballet or music,” she told the Independent in an attempt to explain why her work came so naturally to her. “You have to practise for hours every day. And that’s how you make it. That kind of discipline was very grounding.”

She is an actress of great control who can say a lot while seeming to do very little and whose performances Campion describes as “coming from the inside out”. Yet alongside this restraint comes a natural warmth, which makes even the most closed-off character appear sympathetic. It’s a skill that has stood her in particularly good stead on The Handmaid’s Tale, where Offred hides her resistance to the new regime behind the blank face she presents to the world. She can snap quickly out of a role once off stage and in the wings. “I barely hang on to it while we’re filming,” she admitted to New York magazine. “I am totally that person that they yell ‘cut’ and I’m making jokes and doing stupid stuff. It’s fake to me to be any other way.”

Away from the camera, she is relaxed and a little goofy with a reputation as a joker. “She’s not one of those actresses who is walking around with her headphones on listing to Nine Inch Nails to get into a scene,” Mark Duplass, who worked with her on The One I Love, told New York magazine. “She’s joking around causally and then you yell ‘action’ and her heartbeat goes up to 150 beats per minute.”

Elisabeth Moss starring in The Handmaid’s Tale

Having spent most of her life working, she admits to being occasionally emotionally naive; in an otherwise lighthearted Q&A, she stated that her biggest secret was “I tend to fall in love a little bit too easily sometimes”. A short, unhappy marriage to comedian Fred Armisen, which lasted less than a year amid reports that Armisen thought he was marrying Peggy Olson, not Elizabeth Moss, seems to highlight that truth. “Looking back, I feel like I was really young,” she told New York magazine. “It was extremely traumatic and awful and horrible. At the same time, it turned out for the best. I’m glad I’m not there. I’m glad it didn’t happen when I was 50. Like, that’s probably not going to happen again.”

Perhaps because of this she now prefers a quiet life, renting apartments in New York’s Upper West Side and West Hollywood, LA, and hanging out at a handful of familiar haunts. She says she prefers staying in watching TV to going out but is also a committed shopper. “Whenever she likes something, be it food or clothes or shoes, she orders heaps of it,” noted Campion. “I remember her apartment in New Zealand was piled with boxes. She does girly-girl very well.”

A self-described “card-carrying feminist”, Moss ran in trouble last month after appearing to suggest that The Handmaid’s Tale was a story about “human” rather than “women’s rights”. Always sensitive to perceptions, she was quick to clarify,stressing that she had merely wanted to highlight “the different problems we are facing – the infringements on a lot of different human rights OBVIOUSLY, all caps, it’s a feminist story”.

It was a rare misstep from a preternaturally poised actress and unlikely to be repeated in the near future.

THE MOSS FILES

Born Elisabeth Singleton Moss in Los Angeles, California, 24 July 1982. Her parents were both musicians and she was raised a Scientologist.

Best of times

As Mad Men’s Peggy Olson, she was nominated six times for a best actress Emmy. She has yet to win.

Worst of times

A whirlwind romance with Fred Armisen resulted in a marriage that collapsed in under a year.

What she says

“When someone puts up the gif of Peggy walking down the hall with the box and the cigarette and connects it to International Women’s Day or the Hillary Clinton campaign, I’m always like, ‘Damn, that’s so cool’.”

What they say

“She’s a little bit like a Mona Lisa. There’s a lot that she’s not showing you.”

Jane Campion

THE GUARDIAN