30 Enticing Facts You Didn’t Know About Elisabeth Moss

12 February 2021, 10:00 am EST By Ruby Karnick

Elisabeth Moss, “Queen of Peak TV,” in her three-decade-long career, has not only conquered TV, but also the silver screen with multiple breakout roles. With every single role she takes up, Moss ensures to raise the bar for her fellow actresses, and proves her unmatched talent. Here are some interesting facts about her that will make fans love her more:

During the preparation or her role as Helen Wilder in the 2015 “High-Rise,” the most difficult thing that Moss faced was to speak in a convincing British accent, although she holds a British citizenship.
In the entire series of “The Handmaid’s Tale,” Moss doesn’t wear any kind of make-up for her role as June Osborne / Offred / Ofjoseph, which implies her performance to be essentially naked.
For the first season of “Mad Men,” in an effort to simulate Moss’s character Peggy’s weight gain, costume designer Janie Bryant, along with makeup department head Debbie Zoller, developed an extensive multi-stage makeup and costuming process.
In fact, Bryant had to create different body suits with several levels of padding for her to wear under her costumes, to create the illusion that she was slowly becoming heavier.
As for the makeup, Zoller developed four stages of facial prosthetics, which started with a subtle piece to augment Moss’s chin and neck, to more and more cheek pieces.
Elisabeth Singleton Moss was born on July 24, 1982, to Ron Moss and Linda Moss, in Los Angeles, California. She has a younger brother.
Her parents are musicians – father Ron Moss manages Jazz musicians, while her mother plays blues and jazz professionally.
She studied ballet throughout her teenage years, with aspirations to become a professional dancer. Moss even travelled to New York City to study at the School of American Ballet, before enrolling at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C.
In the initial days of her career as actress, her most popular 2002 commercial for Excedrin that ran for several years, in which she directly advocates the benefits of the medication for people suffering from migraines, provided her with residual income.
Moss is the only cast member from the entire cast of “The Handmaid’s Tale,” who has appeared in every single episode of the entire series.

“The Invisible Man’s director Leigh Whannell once claimed in an interview that having Moss play the role of Cecilia Kass was the best thing in the movie, as she was able to communicate a lot to the audience without any opening scenes that establishes her predicament with Adrian.
Whannell, who has a lot of experience in working with talented actors, went on to say that his experience in working with Moss, was a revelation for him, as there is actually nothing that Moss can’t do.
During the production of the “Top of the Lake” TV series, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, which was supposed to co-produce the show, pulled out of the deal, when Moss was cast in the lead role of Robin Griffin. The project almost lost funding, until UKTV stepped in to co-produce.
In preparation for her role as Becky Something from the 2018 “Her Smell,” she took guitar lessons for a period of three months, before the filming of the movie commenced.
All of her scenes as Mom in the “Light of My Life” were shot in a span of just a single day, which felt like shooting the entire movie in one day. Moss claimed that the scenes were challenging as every scene had so much to be told in a very short time.
The cat photo in her character June’s iPhone in the Episode 5 of Season 1 of “The Handmaid’s Tale,” which Luke claims to be cute is the real photo of Moss's ginger rescue cats, Lucy and Ethel.
The kitchen scene from “The Invisible Man,” in which her character is thrown across the dining room table was not an easy shot, as first Moss was filmed as she was about to be thrown. Then, she would be swapped with a stuntwoman, attached to a rope, and filmed while a stuntman in green suit throws her across the table. Finally Moss was shot again.
For her role as Anne in the 2017 movie “The Square” it was quite a challenge for Moss to adapt to the Swedish direction, but according to director Ruben Östlund, she eventually adjusted.
In the early days of her career, she voiced the character of a little girl Kimmy Ventrix in the 1993 “Batman: The Animated Series: See No Evil.” She also lent her voice to the character of Arisia in the DC Comics’ adaptation “Green Lantern: Emerald Knights.”
Moss met American actor, comedian Fereydun Robert "Fred" Armisen, in October 2008. The duo got engaged in January 2009, and tied the knot on October 25, 2009. However, their relationship didn’t last long as they separated in June 2010, and divorced in May 2011.

Ironically, just like her character of Cecilia Kass in “The Invisible Man,” her character Kimmy Ventrix in the Batman series also communicates with an invisible person, as Kimmy’s father spends time with her using an invisibility suit.
During the filming of Season 3 of “The Handmaid’s Tale,” some of the scenes of her character June Osborne / Offred were filmed inside DC’s Lincoln Memorial, were production personnel were limited to just five people at any time.
During the filming of “The Invisible Man,” she would often be just emoting to an empty room. However, she asked for her co-star Oliver Jackson-Cohen to be present in certain scenes, in an effort to make the performance more authentic.
Moss filmed the first season of the “Top of the Lake” TV series, during the hiatus between the Seasons 5 and 6 of her other TV series “Mad Man,” due to her very busy schedule.
In her movie “Her Smell,” although some of her dialog seems like spur-of-the-moment improvisation, she has confirmed in an interview on National Public Radio that each and every line was on the page and that it was also the hardest dialogue she had ever had.
During the run-up to the 2020 presidential election, she, along with many other cast members of “The West Wing,” reprised their roles in person to perform a staged reading of the episode "Hartsfield's Landing."
Moss claims Bette Davis to be one of her biggest influences, and that she has watched almost all of her movies. She even listed Hilary Swank as one of her inspirations, as she felt a yearning to become an actress and do at least half as good as Swank’s in the “Boy’s Don’t Cry.”
In an interview with Insider, while promoting her movie “Shirley” she has expressed her 100% interest in making a sequel to “The Invisible Man,” as she firmly believes, there is definitely a story to do with Cecilia.
For the episode “The Last Ceremony” from “The Handmaid’s Tale” in which her character June / Offred reunited with her daughter Hannah, the producers did extensive research and every word Moss utters in the exchange was written word for word as how it happens as per records.
She had a very minor role as the young mother being kidnapped along with the group of abducted women in the 2003 movie “The Missing.”