Elisabeth Singleton Moss (born July 24, 1982) is an American actor and producer. The recipient of several accolades, including two Golden Globe Awards, two Primetime Emmy Awards, and a nomination for a Tony Award, she was named "Queen of Peak TV" by Vulture in 2017. Moss began acting in the early 1990s and first gained recognition for playing the youngest daughter of President Josiah Bartlet, in the NBC political drama series The West Wing (1999–2006). She earned wider recognition for playing Peggy Olson, a secretary-turned-copywriter, in the AMC period drama series Mad Men (2007–2015), and subsequently won the Golden Globe Award for Best Actress – Miniseries or Television Film for portraying Detective Robin Griffin in the BBC miniseries Top of the Lake (2013). For producing and starring as June Osborne in the Hulu dystopian drama series The Handmaid's Tale (2017–present), Moss won two Primetime Emmy Awards. She starred in the Apple TV+ series Shining Girls (2022) and the FX on Hulu series The Veil (2024). Moss has also attracted acclaim for her film performances, including supporting roles in Girl, Interrupted (1999), Get Him to the Greek (2010), and Us (2019), and starring roles in The One I Love (2014), The Square (2017), The Invisible Man (2020), and Shirley (2020). She has also starred in three films by Alex Ross Perry, including Her Smell (2018). On stage, she has performed in the Broadway productions of David Mamet's Speed the Plow (2008) and Wendy Wasserstein's The Heidi Chronicles (2015). For the latter, she received a nomination for the Tony Award for Best Actress in a Play. She also appeared in the West End production of Lillian Hellman's The Children's Hour (2011).

Early life

Elisabeth Moss was born on July 24, 1982, in Los Angeles, California. She is the daughter of Ronald Charles Moss, an Englishman from Birmingham, West Midlands, and Linda Moss (née Ekstrom), an American of Swedish descent. Both of Moss's parents were musicians; her mother plays jazz and blues harmonica professionally. Moss has one younger brother. She was raised a Scientologist. Initially, Moss aspired to be a professional dancer. In her adolescence, she traveled to New York City to study ballet at the School of American Ballet, after which she studied with Suzanne Farrell at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C. She continued to study dance through her teenage years, but started getting acting roles as well. To manage her education and career, she began homeschooling, and graduated in 1999.

Career

1990s

Moss's first screen role was in 1990, when she appeared in the NBC miniseries Lucky/Chances. From 1992 until 1995, she appeared as Cynthia Parks in seven episodes of the TV series Picket Fences. She provided the voice of Holly DeCarlo, a main character in the TV special Frosty Returns (1992) and of Michelle in the animated film Once Upon a Forest (1993). She appeared in the television remake of the 1993 film Gypsy and played Harvey Keitel's younger daughter in the film Imaginary Crimes (1994). The following year, she appeared in the remake of the Walt Disney Pictures film Escape to Witch Mountain (1995) and played a young Ashley Judd in the biopic Love Can Build a Bridge (1995). She also had a supporting role in the drama Separate Lives (1995) opposite Jim Belushi and Linda Hamilton, and a minor part in the black comedy The Last Supper (1995). She did more voice work, for the animated series Freakazoid! and the television film It's Spring Training, Charlie Brown! (1996). Beginning in 1999, Moss played the recurring role of Zoey Bartlet in the White House television drama The West Wing, playing the daughter of President Josiah Bartlet (Martin Sheen) and First Lady Abbey Bartlet (Stockard Channing); she portrayed the character until the series finale in 2006. Her character became integral to the fourth season of the show; in a retrospective on the series The Atlantic noted: "Aaron Sorkin made [Moss] the centerpiece of the explosive fourth-season finale where he basically engineered the most insane cliffhanger possible. It required Zoey to be a bit of a pain with her fancy French boyfriend, but Moss always made her relatable, even when the plot required otherwise." In 1999, she had a supporting role as a patient in a mental institution in James Mangold's psychological drama Girl, Interrupted, opposite Winona Ryder and Angelina Jolie, and a minor part in the drama Anywhere but Here. The same year, she had a small role in the film Mumford (1999), playing the daughter of a woman with a shopping addiction.

2000s

In 2002, Moss appeared in a commercial for Excedrin in which she directly addressed the audience about the medication's benefits for people who suffer from migraines. The spot proved enduringly popular and ran for several years, providing Moss with residual income as she struggled to make it as an actor. Moss appeared in Heart of America and three other films in 2004. That year, she made the film Virgin, for which she was nominated for an Independent Spirit Award. Moss also had a supporting part in Ron Howard's Western thriller The Missing (2003). Moss had a supporting role in the 2005–2006 horror series Invasion, and appeared in television again on a 2007 episode of Grey's Anatomy entitled "My Favorite Mistake", and on the series Medium opposite Patricia Arquette. She also appeared in Mary Lambert's 2007 horror film The Attic, the independent drama Day Zero (2007), and the 2008 drama El camino. In 2006, she was cast as Peggy Olson, a secretary who evolves into a copywriter in the AMC dramatic series Mad Men. Between 2009 and the series' final season in 2015, Moss was nominated for five Primetime Emmy Awards for Outstanding Lead Actress in a Drama Series. She was nominated for the Outstanding Supporting Actress Emmy. Reflecting on her casting in the series, Moss recalled: "I auditioned [for the role]. There were scripts for two pilots that everyone was talking about at the time that were really good, and Mad Men was one of them." Moss has stated her favorite episode is "The Suitcase" (2010) from season 4. Moss stated, "It was just a sort of wonderful bubble of an episode. I relished it and I’m super proud of how it came out." Luke de Smet of Slant wrote of the episode, "The Suitcase” made for some absolutely tremendous television. Don and Peggy’s respective breakdowns all but guarantee that this will be the Emmy tape for both Hamm and Moss". While a series regular on Mad Men, Moss made her Broadway debut in October 2008, playing the role of Karen in the 20th Anniversary revival of Speed-the-Plow by David Mamet. In his review Ben Brantley of The New York Times acknowledged her role in Mad Men but noted "She definitely doesn’t just repeat what she does on television." He added, "Ms. Moss proves the lie in that assessment, bringing a naked clarity to her unvarnished, tinny-voiced Karen that makes the play hang together in ways it didn’t before." She then briefly appeared in the romantic comedy film Did You Hear About the Morgans? (2009), playing Sarah Jessica Parker's assistant, followed by a part in the comedy Get Him to the Greek (2010) opposite Jonah Hill.

2010s

In 2011, Moss made her West End debut as Martha Dobie in Lillian Hellman's play The Children's Hour, opposite Keira Knightley and Rebecca Hall. The play opened at The Comedy Theatre, London on January 22, 2011. Michael Billington of The Guardian described her performance as "Outstanding" noting, "Moss's achievement, in fact, is to combine the everyday busyness of a working teacher with subtle hints she has a suppressed longing that transcends mere friendship." In 2012, she was cast as Galatea Dunkel in the independent drama On the Road, based on Jack Kerouac's novel of the same name. Moss played detective Robin Griffin in the 2013 Sundance Channel miniseries Top of the Lake, a co-production by the Sundance Channel, the UK's BBC Two and Australia's UKTV, written and directed by Jane Campion. For her role, Moss received the Golden Globe Award for Best Actress – Miniseries or Television Film. In 2014, Moss starred in the independent film Listen Up Philip (2014), her first collaboration with writer-director Alex Ross Perry. She also starred in Charlie McDowell's The One I Love (2014) with Mark Duplass. Film critic Manhola Dargis of The New York Times wrote of her performance, "Ms. Moss, an amazing actress fast breaking free of the limits imposed on her by Mad Men...[Here] she creates a complex portrait of a woman tested by love whose smiles work like a barricade until fissures of feeling break down her last defenses. Ms. Moss lifts her and this movie with supple and steely grace." In September 2014, it was announced that Moss would star on Broadway as Heidi Holland in The Heidi Chronicles. The play opened on March 19, 2015, at The Music Box Theatre. Though the play received some positive reviews, it closed on May 3, 2015, due to low ticket sales. Charles Isherwood of The New York Times praised her writing "Ms. Moss, a superb actor who possesses an unusual ability to project innocence and smarts at the same time" adding, "Moss puts her own distinctive stamp on the part". For her performance she was nominated for a Tony Award for Best Actress in a Play. After production on Mad Men had wrapped, Moss collaborated again with Alex Ross Perry, starring in Queen of Earth (2015), a psychological thriller opposite Katherine Waterston and Patrick Fugit, in which she plays a mentally unstable woman who unravels at a vacation home in the company of her close friends. Scott Foundas of Variety declared, "The movie belongs to Moss...who seems to have gotten profoundly on to Perry’s wavelength. She plays out Catherine’s decline with such startling, unpredictable rhythms that her every gesture seems conceived in the moment." She was cast in a supporting part in the British dystopian drama High-Rise (2015), opposite Tom Hiddleston and Sienna Miller. Moss appeared in the Chuck Wepner biopic Chuck (2016), opposite Liev Schreiber. In 2017, she appeared in Mad to Be Normal, a biopic of the Scottish psychiatrist R.D. Laing, and co-starred in the film adaptation of Anton Chekhov's play The Seagull alongside Saoirse Ronan, Annette Bening, and Corey Stoll. The second season of Top of the Lake, consisting of six episodes, premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in May 2017 which is set in Sydney, Australia. That same year, Moss began playing June Osbourne / Offred in the Hulu series The Handmaid's Tale, for which she has received critical acclaim and a Primetime Emmy Award for Lead Actress in a Drama Series. Liz Shannon Miller of IndieWire wrote, "[The show] owes a tremendous amount to Moss as its star...as an actor, she has to communicate silently without revealing too much about what the character really thinks.". She added, "[Moss] fully commands each and every moment, every swallowed emotion and thought." In 2018, Moss had a lead role in a short film for the song "On the Nature of Daylight", by British composer Max Richter, from his album The Blue Notebooks. Moss reunited with Alex Ross Perry for Her Smell (2018), portraying the role of a fictional rock star whose band breaks up over her self-destructive behavior, and appeared in The Old Man & the Gun, directed by David Lowery. Both films received positive reviews from critics. In 2019, Moss co-starred in Jordan Peele's psychological horror film Us alongside Lupita Nyong'o. Later that year, she starred in The Kitchen, alongside Melissa McCarthy and Tiffany Haddish, which follows three housewives who, after their mobster husbands are sent to prison, continue to operate their business.

2020s

In 2020, Moss starred in Shirley, opposite Michael Stuhlbarg and directed by Josephine Decker, portraying the role of author Shirley Jackson, which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival. She also had the starring role in the horror-thriller film The Invisible Man, alongside Oliver Jackson-Cohen and Storm Reid, which was released on February 28, 2020, to critical acclaim. In 2021, Moss appeared in The French Dispatch, directed by Wes Anderson. She appeared in Next Goal Wins, directed by Taika Waititi, in 2023. In 2020, Moss also launched a production company Love & Squalor Pictures. She was set to star in and produce Run Rabbit Run directed by Daina Reid, but ultimately withdrew due to scheduling issues. In 2022 she starred as Kirby Mazrachi in the Apple TV+ thriller series Shining Girls based off the 2013 novel of the same name by Lauren Beukes. She also served as the executive producer and directed two episodes. Moss stated that the experience was "definitely one of the most complicated things I've ever done". In his review, Daniel Fienberg of The Hollywood Reporter declared, "No single actor in the past 25 years has a more reliable television track record than Elisabeth Moss". In 2024 she starred in the FX on Hulu thriller limited series The Veil starring as Imogen Salter, a veteran MI6 agent. She also served as an executive producer. David Bianculli of NPR wrote, "By the end of the six episodes of The Veil, I was convinced that this is Moss' best role, and best performance, yet. She's amazing." Ben Travers of IndieWire wrote a mixed review praising Moss as an actress and comparing her to "Julia Louis-Dreyfus and Carrie Coon" but described the spy thriller series as "regressive to the genre itself".

Personal life

Moss holds both British and American citizenship. She met Fred Armisen in October 2008, and they became engaged in January 2009, marrying on October 25, 2009, in Long Island City, New York. They separated in June 2010, and in September 2010, Moss filed for divorce, which was finalized on May 13, 2011. Moss practices Scientology and identifies as a feminist. After a fan questioned whether her role in the Hulu series The Handmaid's Tale made her think about her involvement with the Church of Scientology, Moss defended her beliefs on Instagram, writing that fan's description of Scientology and the fictional Gilead's supposedly mutual belief "that all outside sources are wrong or evil" is "actually not true at all." She continued, "Religious freedom and tolerance and understanding the truth and equal rights for every race, religion and creed are extremely important to me." In January 2024, Moss confirmed that she was pregnant with her first child.

Filmography

Film

Television

Theatre

Awards and nominations

Moss earned critical acclaim and numerous accolades for her performances in film and television. She received two Golden Globe Awards from four nominations, two Primetime Emmy Awards from fourteen nominations, two Critics' Choice Television Awards from five nominations, and two Screen Actors Guild Awards from fifteen nominations.