Behind every MAD MEN... Issue #38

Quietly stealing the scene from behind a dowdy secretary’s outfit, Elisabeth Moss makes her presence known.

By Dana Stewart
Published: December 1st, 2008 | 12:00am

The television show Mad Men is remarkable for a number of reasons, but perhaps most compelling is the collection of superb, disparate actors who share the spotlight as much as is possible in any good serial drama. Because of the show’s popularity and critical success, we are getting to know a number of new faces, many of whom are seasoned actors, but who have never commanded attention the way they do now.

Mad Men creator Matthew Weiner (who also created The Sopranos) specializes in rendering deep, relatable characters. But it’s the part played by Elisabeth Moss that stands out. Peggy — a young, ambitious, but somewhat drab girl from Brooklyn — is introduced as a secretary, but soon makes her way up to copywriter in an advertising agency full of blatantly sexist males. For this reason, Peggy has been considered by many to be the feminist torch-bearer on the show, and Moss has experiences to prove it; “I’ve had so many different women, older women, younger women, come up to me and say that they love Peggy, or that they feel a certain identification with Peggy ... I’ve talked to a couple of girls [who’ve] said to me, you know, we still deal with that, there are still things that only men go to, and the women aren’t invited ... I think the parallels are really easy to identify with.”

Peggy is considerably more dowdy than her female co-stars, characters played by January Jones (Betty Draper) and Christina Hendricks (Joan Holloway). “I mean, of course I love all the pretty dresses [January] wears, and I think, ‘Ooh, I wish I could wear the ball gown!’ and Christina always looks dynamite, of course, but I think it’s definitely worth it, to play the part that I do,” says Moss. “Peggy represents a kind of honesty, truth, that can sometimes be considered naiveté, but really she’s just preoccupied with honesty.”

Moss’s character on Mad Men has some striking parallels with a character she is now portraying in a Broadway revival of David Mamet’s Speed-the-Plow, a morality play set in a film production office in the late ‘80s. Moss plays an office secretary, caught between two male showbiz professionals played by Jeremy Piven and Raúl Esparza. Although Moss has been working in film and television since the ripe age of six, Speed-the-Plow is her debut on Broadway.

Elisabeth has recently wrapped on three independent films, a genre in which she has been successful in the past (she was critically lauded for her performance as a pregnant teenager in the gritty 2003 drama, Virgin). In New Orleans, Mon Amour, an unconventional love story released in early 2008, Moss plays an activist at work in post-Katrina New Orleans. “We shot a lot in the Lower Ninth Ward, one year after Katrina ... we’d be just walking around, and see, like, a house on top of another house. It was very apocalyptic, very surreal. It was really important to us to document that city, the devastation, to get it on film,” said Moss.

You can also catch her singing in Buddy Gilbert Comes Alive, a low-budget love story about a struggling songwriter, who ends up taking Moss’ character on the road to sing with him. “I’ve never had ambition to sing professionally before,” says Moss, who has not only been acting for 21 years but has also danced ballet with professional companies. “It’s not something I would normally be able to do, go up on stage and sing a song ... I loved getting the chance to do it, that’s one of the things I love about my job.”

El Camino, another independent drama, is what Moss describes as “the classic road trip film,” but with a postmodern, Ingmar Bergman-esque twist. The film — which centers around three characters engaged in a cross-country road trip — is shot “beautifully,” says Moss, “It does look very stark, you know, you sort of feel the loneliness of these characters as well as the loneliness of the country as they go across it.” Moss’s character in the film is a former exotic dancer, and although that’s only background information in the movie, she did have one scene where her character, as she says, “got to dance in a provocative outfit, not like stripping or anything, but I actually had quite a good time with it!”

Clearly, Elisabeth Moss has had no problem finding interesting roles in show business, and if the success of Mad Men is any indication, even more scripts will soon be piling up at her doorstep. The show has wrapped on its second season, and picked up six awards at the Emmys in September. Her first trip to the awards ceremony, Moss says it was “definitely the way to do the Emmys,” with a laugh. In regards to the show’s popularity, Moss says, “I think that ultimately the show is about humanity. It’s about people, work, friendships, relationships, marriage. It’s about things that are universal, no matter what time period it is. If it were just a show about advertising, or just a show about the difference between men and women, it would get old.”