Elis­a­beth Moss: ​‘As women, we’re expect­ed to not be that unpleasant’

Some­where between art­house and stu­dio pic­ture, Shirley feels like a nat­ur­al fit for Elis­a­beth Moss, who was cat­a­pult­ed to star­dom on the back of per­for­mances on the small screen in Mad Men and The Handmaid’s Tale. In film she has tend­ed to skew more indie: she’s a main­stay of Alex Ross Perry’s fil­mog­ra­phy, and deliv­ered a blis­ter­ing per­for­mance as a musi­cian bat­tling mul­ti­ple demons in 2019’s Her Smell.

Her pen­chant for play­ing com­plex, unpre­dictable women has made her one of the most inter­est­ing actors work­ing today, and her won­der­ful­ly wicked per­for­mance as the objec­tion­able, enchant­i­ng Shirley Jack­son allows her to demon­strate a unique tal­ent for being aching­ly vul­ner­a­ble and unex­pect­ed­ly acer­bic in a sin­gle breath.

LWLies: What was it about Sarah Gub­bins’ script for Shirley that drew you in?

Moss: How do you describe a good script? It was just bril­liant. This was a unique, bril­liant way of look­ing at her sto­ry, and it felt more like a Shirley Jack­son nov­el than a Shirley Jack­son biopic, which I thought was real­ly intrigu­ing. It felt very dif­fer­ent from any­thing I’d ever played – but I think it was all those fac­tors, not real­ly just one thing.

How famil­iar were you with Shirley Jack­son at that point? Had you read a lot of her work?

No, not real­ly. I’d read ​‘The Lot­tery’, but that was it. I knew who she was, but I wasn’t that famil­iar with her work. I think that’s true for a lot of people,‘The Lot­tery’ is this sto­ry every­one reads in school, and ​‘The Haunt­ing of Hill House’ is her most famous work.

Tra­di­tion­al­ly male authors – like Ker­ouac or Bukows­ki or Hem­ing­way – have been giv­en free rein to be dif­fi­cult and unpleas­ant in the name of genius. It feels like this is one of the first times I’ve seen a female author giv­en the same licence to be that complex.

Yeah, absolute­ly. I mean, I will say that the por­tray­al of her in the film is based on a work of fic­tion so it’s kind of an anti-biopic. In real life Shirley was def­i­nite­ly not as unpleas­ant, and she was a great mom and she was a great home­mak­er. But I do think it’s inter­est­ing that it’s much more unusu­al to have a female char­ac­ter that is an anti-hero or an anti-hero­ine or is con­sid­ered abra­sive or dif­fi­cult. And I think that’s also just true of life – as women, it’s expect­ed of us to not be that unpleasant.

It’s so refresh­ing that Shirley and Rose delight in being objec­tion­able, par­tic­u­lar­ly in the oppres­sive, very male-dom­i­nat­ed world that they live in.

And even though Shirley was a bit more pleas­ant in real life, she was def­i­nite­ly a trail­blaz­er and a woman who real­ly was doing it all: she was a mom; she had a house; and then she was also a pro­lif­ic writer churn­ing out a lot of mate­r­i­al in a short amount of time. She was very much alone as a woman in that field. It was so fun for me to play some­body who is that abra­sive and dif­fi­cult and hon­est. And to get to real­ly just see what the char­ac­ter meant and not hold back. If she was in a bad mood, she was in a bad mood and it didn’t feel like you had to put a smile on your face and be pleasant.

It remind­ed me a lot of your per­for­mance in Her Smell. I feel like there’s a line between Becky and Shirley, in that they’re both these extreme­ly tal­ent­ed women who are also incred­i­bly dif­fi­cult. Have you noticed any con­nec­tions in the roles that you choose?

Yeah, I think there is a con­nec­tion but it’s ran­dom because I don’t try for there to be a con­nec­tion. I think I just like play­ing strong, com­pli­cat­ed peo­ple. I guess it’s not a con­scious thing on my part – that’s what I enjoy. Act­ing is com­pli­cat­ed, but I guess these inter­est­ing women do become a through-line in my work.

Giv­en that you’ve been act­ing for a long time, have you seen a change in the kind of scripts you get giv­en and the kind of parts you’re asked to read for?

I def­i­nite­ly think that in the past decade, there have been more and more com­pli­cat­ed, inter­est­ing char­ac­ters who are women, and that it is more on a par with what the men have got­ten for a very long time. I do think that’s some­thing which has come to the fore­front. If you look at the kind of movies that are com­ing out, whether it’s big Mar­vel movies or whether it’s small­er films like Promis­ing Young Woman or Por­trait of a Lady on Fire. I do think that from big to small films, and on tele­vi­sion as well, there is this gigan­tic move­ment towards com­pli­cat­ed, inter­est­ing female characters.

When you came togeth­er for pre-pro­duc­tion, what kind of con­ver­sa­tions were you hav­ing with Josephine and Michael about the kind of char­ac­ters you were about to leap into?

My pre-pro­duc­tion was long on this because I’m a pro­duc­er as well so it start­ed with cast­ing and it start­ed with crew­ing-up and every­thing. I worked on it for nine months before we start­ed film­ing. Michael came on real­ly ear­ly, he was our first and only choice. A lot of our process was read­ing her sto­ries, read­ing any bio­graph­i­cal mate­r­i­al that we could get our hands on, read­ing let­ters that we got from the Library of Con­gress between Stan­ley and Shirley, and between Shirley and her friends and between Stan­ley and his friends. We pored over that mate­r­i­al togeth­er for the week before we start­ed because that’s just how the sched­ul­ing worked out, and we just kind of dove in. There were a lot of con­ver­sa­tions pre­vi­ous­ly and there was a lot of research done, but in the end we just had this incred­i­ble script that Sarah Gub­bins wrote, and that was our map. It was all there.

Like you say, the script real­ly does feel like a Shirley Jack­son nov­el. It’s very dark but there’s this bit­ing wit which real­ly can’t be under­sold. It’s such a fun­ny film.

And Shirley and Stan­ley were such fun­ny peo­ple. You can see from their let­ters and what I’ve heard from one of their sons, Lau­rence, that they both had a great sense of humour and I do think that that is reflect­ed in the film, even though there are things that are fic­tion­al and there are things that are not true. But there are ele­ments of who they real­ly were that are real­ly strong: their pas­sion for each oth­er; their humour; their ded­i­ca­tion to their work and writing.

You men­tioned you spoke to Lau­rence about his moth­er. Did you feel any kind of pres­sure to get your por­tray­al right, because even though it is fic­tion­alised, it’s still a real person?

Yeah, we did kind of feel pres­sure in the begin­ning. But I said to Michael, ​‘You know what we have to do now? We have to let that go. We have to play our ver­sion of Shirley and Stan­ley, and we have to have faith in that and we have to have faith in the work that we’ve done, and do the movie that’s in front of us.’ So we did get over it.

Shirley is released 30 Octo­ber. Read more in LWLies 86: The Shirley issue.