Queen Elisabeth

With The Handmaid’s Tale, The Mad Men Actress Finds A Role That Could Bring Her Even More Acclaim—And Finally Put Hulu On Par With Its Streaming Rivals.

- Jason Lynch

After you’ve starred in one of the greatest TV series of all time—Mad Men—it would seem that there’s nowhere to go, career-wise, but down. That is, unless you’re Elisabeth Moss, whose 28-year acting career has revolved around one seemingly peerless TV project after another. “If you thought about it too much, you’d never do anything again, because you’d be like, there’s never going to be anything as good as The West Wing, or Top of the Lake, or Mad Men, or whatever,” says Moss, who in 2015 wrapped her seven-season stint as Mad Men’s secretary-turned-copy chief Peggy Olson. “My own choices have proven to me that it’s best just to follow where the great material is, and don’t worry about it.”

Incredibly, her instincts seemed to have led her to a role that could bring her even more acclaim than Peggy: Off red, the star of Hulu’s riveting and visually stunning new drama The Handmaid’s Tale. Based on Margaret Atwood’s 1985 dystopian novel in which the government has been overthrown by a fundamentalist regime and the few women still able to conceive are enslaved, the MGM Television series, which premiered last Wednesday, has garnered the kind of rapturous reviews and buzz that the decade-old streaming service has spent years longing for. “It is unflinching, vital and scary as hell,” says The New York Times, while The Hollywood Reporter deemed the series “Hulu’s first essential original.”

The show’s splashy debut—which seems primed to give Hulu the same credibility and awards spotlight that Transparent previously orchestrated for Amazon, and House of Cards and Orange Is the New Black for Netflix—comes as Hulu prepares for its NewFronts presentation on Wednesday morning, where it will celebrate its most ambitious year yet (see sidebar).