According to Scientology records that have been made public, Moss took the Hubbard Key to Life Course when she was eight and achieved the state of Clear when she was eleven. Although Moss downplays her religious affiliation publicly, she is part of a small set of second-generation Hollywood Scientologists, and her religious network has played a role in her career. Her manager since the age of ten has been Gay Ribisi, the mother of the actors Giovanni and Marissa Ribisi, a prominent Scientology family; when she was preparing for “Her Smell” and needed to ask someone about punk rock, she called Beck, who at the time was married to Marissa Ribisi. (He has since denied that he ever “actively pursued” Scientology.)
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. But her ballet training gave her a sense of rhythm, she said, and an instinct for “how your entire body can communicate an emotion in a scene, whether it’s stillness or the opposite of stillness.” That same year, after a “cobbled together” education of homeschooling and tutors, she got her G.E.D. She knew she wanted to be a full-time actress: “I was, like, I don’t know why I need algebra.”
As a teen-ager with gawky features, Moss began to figure out where she fit in in Hollywood. “I wasn’t the perfect-cheerleader type. I couldn’t get one of those WB shows to save my f*cking life,” she said. “It was also to do with my style as an actor, which was kind of weird, and remains kind of weird. I was not very good at playing something straight.” In 1999, she appeared as an institutionalized burn victim in “Girl, Interrupted” and began her role on “The West Wing,” as Zoey Bartlet. At her audition, she saw an actress who looked just like Winnie Cooper, from “The Wonder Years.” “I remember thinking, Oh, that’s that. Winnie Cooper’s here. I’m not getting this part,” she recalled. “And all three times I read with this man who seemed really nice and was really good at the dialogue, and I had no idea who he was. It was only after I got the part that I realized it was Aaron Sorkin.”
At nineteen, Moss moved to New York to act in an Off Broadway play, “Franny’s Way,” alongside Martin Scorsese’s daughter Domenica. (The Times wrote that both actresses “mix defensive malice and vulnerability.”) After the run, she moved into an apartment in Stuyvesant Town that she found on Craigslist and shared with a fiftysomething man whose name, she thinks, was either Johnny or Walter. “He had the living room, which had a partition, and I had the bedroom, which had a mattress on the floor,” she recalled. “He was a substitute teacher, so he was gone during the day, and I was nineteen, so I was kind of out all night.” She stayed in the apartment for three or four years. In 2003, she starred in an indie film called “Virgin,” as a pregnant teen-ager who believes she is carrying the child of God, and was nominated for an Independent Spirit Award. But she was often short on cash, and Johnny-slash-Walter would sometimes cover her four-hundred-dollar rent. She had no backup plan and no day job. “It was this weird juxtaposition of being a super tiny bit famous but then also having absolutely no money,” she said. “I’d go, ‘I don’t think I can get another job. They’re going to be, like, Why is Zoey Bartlet working at the coffee shop?’”
After years of intermittent roles, she auditioned for “Mad Men.” She showed up looking like a “beachy California girl”: long blond hair, tanned skin, skimpy halter dress. “I looked nothing like Peggy,” she said. But she got the part. “I just knew who she f*cking was. It felt like putting on the most comfortable sweater you own. It felt like a good co*cktail.”
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. “The first season, I spent a lot of time sitting outside an office,” she recalled. “I’d be behind the door on a typewriter. And the door would close, and I’d pull out a gossip magazine, and when I heard the scene was ending I’d put it back and the door would open, and I’d be there pretending to type again.” Her first indication that Peggy was destined for something greater was when the creator, Matthew Weiner, showed the cast the opening credits, and she saw that her name was second, after Jon Hamm’s.
In 2008, Hamm hosted “Saturday Night Live,” and Moss made a cameo in a “Mad Men” sketch. That night, she met Fred Armisen, a cast member. Three months later, they got engaged, and they were married within a year. “I was twenty-seven years old, and I was young, and things happened for reasons that I believed in at the time,” she told me. They split after eight months. Not long afterward, Moss told the Post, “One of the greatest things I heard someone say about him is, ‘He’s so great at doing impersonations. But the greatest impersonation he does is that of a normal person.’ To me, that sums it up.” Since then, the story of what happened between them has played out cryptically in the press: Armisen admitting he was a “terrible husband,” Moss saying that the marriage was “traumatic.” In 2015, Armisen told Marc Maron, on his podcast, that he’d been caught up in the fantasy of dating the girl from “Mad Men.” “I have a problem with intimacy, where, all of a sudden, there’s a real person there,” he told Maron. He added that he tended to sabotage relationships with infidelity.
When I read these comments to Moss, she said, evenly, “I would say, good for him for being open about that. He said more to Marc Maron than he said to me at the time.” She went on, “I definitely learned that you should make sure you know somebody before you marry them.” Her best friend, Susan Goldberg, who was an AMC executive during “Mad Men,” told me, “It was rough. One of the things Lizzie says, which I think is true, is everyone is into Hollywood breakups. We all get Us Weekly when we’re getting on the plane, so she understands the interest behind it. But then, when it’s you, it’s not that fun.”
In Season 5 of “Mad Men,” Peggy gets another job and gives notice to her mentor, Don Draper. When Moss, shooting the scene, held out her hand for a handshake, Hamm surprised her by kissing it and not letting go, and the camera caught Moss choking up. She kept only one costume from the show, the purple dress she wears in that scene. “I don’t know if it was my favorite scene to shoot, but it was the most real,” she told me. “Because I was just about to go do ‘Top of the Lake,’ and I had this feeling of leaving the nest, and that I was going to go off and try something new.”
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.”
The Scientology thing. Even the casual Moss fan has to grapple with cognitive dissonance: what’s an approachably cool pop-culture feminist icon doing in an organization that its defectors, among other critics, describe as a dangerous cult? It’s tempting to imagine that she’s just culturally Scientologist, like a Jew who goes to temple only on Yom Kippur. And yet, according to a Web site that tracks “service completions” listed in Scientology magazines, in 2017 Moss did a Purification Rundown, a detox treatment that involves prolonged heat exposure and ingesting large quantities of niacin.
When I brought up Scientology, Moss was Zooming from her trailer in Toronto, sitting on the floor. In my time with her, she had been friendly and accessible. “I don’t want to come off as being cagey,” she said. “If you and I met, just hanging out as friends, I’m, like, an open book about it.” But, she added, “I don’t want people to be distracted by something when they’re watching me. I want them to be seeing the character. I feel like, when actors reveal too much of their lives, I’m sometimes watching something and I’m going, Oh, I know that she just broke up with that person, or, I know that she loves to do hot yoga, or whatever it is.”
I told her that people are already distracted by it—that they don’t always know how to hold the public and the private Lizzies in their mind. Smiling, she replied, “People can obviously hold in their mind whatever they want to, and I can’t control that. If it’s not that, it’s going to be something else.” She smeared on lip balm and continued, “It’s not really a closed-off religion. It’s a place that is very open to, like, welcoming in somebody who wants to learn more about it. I think that’s the thing that is probably the most misunderstood.”
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.” I asked how Scientology had helped her as she grew up. She scratched her neck, thinking, and said, “Communication is something that I obviously use so much, not only in my job but in my interpersonal relationships as well. That is probably one of the No. 1 basic things that I grew up learning and grew up using and use every day: the power of just being able to listen to somebody, of making somebody feel heard, of not belittling them for what they think or believe, even if you think it’s wrong. ”
