“I like playing roles that are very conflicted or have some major trauma, which is all very different from my life,” Elisabeth Moss said, in a new Profile.
Moss’s parents joined Scientology before she was born. Her father, who comes from England, once played in a jazz band with Ron Miscavige, whose son, David, is the current head of the Church. According to an interview that Ron Moss gave last year, on the occasion of Corea’s death, he and Corea met in England, at the Scientology headquarters in East Grinstead, around the early seventies. Soon afterward, Ron moved to L.A. and became Corea’s tour manager, and they formed a label together.
Moss says that her friends growing up were mostly other ballerinas, not the children of Scientologists. As an adolescent, she acted on shows such as “Picket Fences” and continued to dance, attending the School of American Ballet, in New York, and studying at Suzanne Farrell’s summer intensive at the Kennedy Center. At fifteen, she faced a choice: apply for year-round ballet programs or pursue acting. “I remember thinking, I want to have a career past thirty-five,” she said.
In the first season of “Mad Men,” Peggy is so naïve that she doesn’t realize she’s pregnant until she goes into labor. Moss brought an uncanny, even creepy quality to the character which added to the show’s gelid mystique. In one scene, she tells her condescending supervisor, Joan, “I just realized something. You think you’re being helpful.” Moss delivered the line in a slow whisper, like an alien observing an earthling. She had little sense of how Peggy would evolve.
Among the “Mad Men” cast, Moss has had the most adventurous post-show career. Josephine Decker, who directed “Shirley,” told me, “She’s drawn to really complicated material.” But Decker admitted that there was “an ocean of Lizzie” that remained enigmatic to her: “I never talked to her about the Scientology thing, but I’m really curious about it.”
One of the tenets of Scientology is that the mind is divided into two parts: the analytical, which we use to make conscious choices, and the reactive, which holds on to trauma and pain, and must be vanquished in order to “go Clear.” It seems like an odd fit for Moss, who is drawn to performing trauma. “Well,” Moss said, “I think it’s more about those traumatic incidents, or those moments of pain, whether it’s emotional or physical, holding you back from being who you are now.
That year, Moss won her “Handmaid’s” Emmy, and she thanked her mother onstage for teaching her “that you can be kind and a fucking badass.”ran a story in which a former Scientologist claimed that swearing was part of how adherents communicate “down the tone scale” to average people; Tony Ortega, who writes a Scientology whistle-blower blog, explained, “Cursing in Scientology is almost a sacrament,” having trickled down from L. Ron Hubbard’s time in the Navy.
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