Elisabeth Moss Discusses Her Complicated Character & Complex Portrayal in 'The Veil' With Hollywood Life

Hollywood Life

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00:00Avery Thompson, Hollywood Life. Elizabeth, you know, you are so busy, you have so many

00:05different roles. What was it about Imogen that was particularly intriguing to you?

00:09I've always wanted to do something in the spy genre. But this was like, that times 100.

00:18Because Imogen is, you know, so many different people. And the person that you meet at the

00:24beginning is the different person from the one you meet 10 minutes later to the different person

00:29that you'll meet at the second episode, and so on and so forth. So for me, it was like this

00:34opportunity to get to play 10 characters in in one project, you know. And when it came my way,

00:42it was the headlines were FX, Steven Knight and Denise Tenobbi. And I was like, well,

00:47it's gonna be good. It's probably gonna be a good project and a good script. And then it just was,

00:55I remember talking to my agents and manager and just being like,

00:58I don't think this is something I can say no to. Like, I think I'll regret this. If I say no.

01:04Did you have to do a lot of training to play an MI6 agent?

01:07I did. The biggest thing was the dialect. So I did about six months of dialect work.

01:11And then I started training a couple months out, I started like physically getting in shape

01:16before that. But like, I started doing stunt training and fight training in Paris,

01:22as part of our prep, and then just continued in Turkey and continued throughout the process of

01:27just we had three big fights to learn. And so I just kept as whenever we could on the weekends,

01:32like, just trying to train as much as I could. Denise, you know, this is an international

01:38show on a very global scale. How did you just sort of decide where the playing fields would be?

01:44Steve has, Steve Knight, the creator, has a personal connection, his family from Turkey.

01:50And it made sense for the story because Turkey and Syria and you know, these countries are the

01:57areas where there's a huge influx of these camps where the story begins. So, and we but we wanted

02:03to shoot in an area of Turkey that you had never seen before. So we shot in these mountains in

02:09Central Turkey that have never been shot, and rarely even photographed. I mean, they're really

02:14in the middle of nowhere and extremely challenging to get to. So that sounded exciting to us. And it

02:21was exciting, but it was more difficult than we anticipated. And, you know, we did know we wanted

02:27a lot of the story to take place in Paris and have the French intelligence kind of be the nexus of

02:33the story of these other agencies all trying to work together, the CIA and the, you know, the MI6,

02:40trying to work together with the French and all the conflict and, and chaos that comes with that.

02:45So we knew we wanted to shoot in France. And then we knew that we wanted the story to then wrap up

02:52in the UK. You know, we get a lot of spy shows, you know, I feel like we've had, you know,

02:56several over the years, but this is very much like a two hander and a very like claustrophobic,

03:00almost intimate kind of situation. What was it like to sort of build

03:04that tension on this sort of road trip from hell, maybe a little bit? Yeah, it's funny,

03:10because it didn't feel I mean, to us, because we traveled so much, and we shot in so many different

03:16places, even in Central Turkey, we would be shooting an hour to this way or an hour that way

03:22we've shot so many different places, even in the UK, you know, and not just London, like we just

03:29it was so we were all over the place the whole time I saw neighborhoods in Paris that I would

03:34have never gotten to see like it just was it. So it felt to us like not that at all. It felt,

03:41you know, intimate in a character way, for sure. But I mean, I'm used to doing, you know,

03:47something where you're in one city for six months, you know, even if that city's New Zealand, you

03:51know, it's, or that country's New Zealand. It's just so for me, it felt like we were constantly

03:57moving, constantly packing, constantly unpacking, you know, the amount of just like, hotels and cars

04:05was a lot. Yeah, I know you're an executive producer on this, you know, and the Handmaid's

04:09Tale is also very much a pressure cooker of a show. You know, did you learn or take anything

04:13away from that experience, you know, in creating this sort of very different world of danger, but

04:19also equally dangerous? You mean, did I take something from Handmaid's into the veil or vice

04:23versa? Into the veil. I think the thing that was so different about the veil was the international

04:29nature of it. As an executive producer, working with so many different languages,

04:36working between so many different countries, having constantly on set and off set people,

04:42just having different ways of working, and having to sort of bring all those people together and

04:46have one conversation was a challenge. Everyone did it so beautifully. And we were very lucky to

04:52have a fantastic French production team and a fantastic Turkish production team and UK, but it

04:58just, it was a lot of coordination. So that was definitely something that as an EP, as a producer,

05:04guided by Denise, I learned so much about and I'm hoping to be able to take into the future.

05:10But I would like to say Elizabeth's experience on Handmaid's and all the other things she's done

05:15was so valuable to me personally and to the show. She truly is a phenomenal producer,

05:24and really her breadth of knowledge is tremendous as a director, as a producer, as an actor.

05:30It was just wonderful to have that in the partnership. Thank you.

05:36Thank you so much for taking the time.

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