The Handmaid’s Tale’s star can’t help turning her characters into feminist heroes, even if she’s just trying to play a human.
COVERING THE WALLS at every booth in Elisabeth Moss’s favorite place, Cafe Fiorello, across the street from Lincoln Center, are brass plaques bearing the names of devoted regulars: Katie Couric! Paul Shaffer! Richard Belzer! And soon—major, breaking news—Elisabeth Moss and her mother, Linda, a professional jazz and blues harmonica player. “Isn’t that crazy?!” says Moss, with a breathless excitement that seems to far exceed her thrill at winning a 2014 Golden Globe for her performance as a police detective confronting her dark past in Jane Campion’s SundanceTV series Top of the Lake, or those six Emmy nominations she got for playing Peggy Olson on AMC’s Mad Men. “I mean,” she goes on, “it means so much to us! We’ve been coming here for over 20 years, so to get a plaque is just truly a milestone for us.”
In fact, her mom will be here later to meet her for dinner, which they’ve been doing twice a week since Moss got back from six months shooting the Hulu series The Handmaid’s Tale in Toronto, which debuted its first three episodes on April 26. It’s based on Margaret Atwood’s 1985 dystopian novel, now back on the best-seller list in the age of Trump, about a future in which the United States has become a terrifying fundamentalist patriarchy that has stripped women of all reproductive rights. At the center is Moss, as Offred, the titular handmaid, who, like many other young, fertile women in this new world order, has been forced into a gilded prison as a “two-legged womb” bearing children for the barren wives of the elite.
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