The Visible Woman

For actor Elisabeth Moss, a little bit of mystery is always in fashion.

- Christine Lennon

Elisabeth Moss’s face, which is pale, lineless 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 compartmentalizing,” 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 of The Handmaid’s Tale, 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 track pants. “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 Mad Men, or June, the enslaved procreator-slash-agent of chaos on Handmaid’s, 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, The Invisible Man, a modern retelling of the H.G. Wells sci-fi novel of the same name (filmed largely in Sydney), that canvas of a face is on full display, panicked and paranoid as she plays a woman terrorized by an abusive ex-boyfriend whom no one else can see.