Elisabeth Moss takes challenges of ‘The Veil’

Elisabeth Moss was ready for a different acting direction after she finished working on the critically heralded “The Handmaid’s Tale.” That series took her to some very dark places and she was looking for something a little lighter.

A comedy or a romance would have seemed the best option to find something different. But, Moss found the role she needed with the spy thriller “The Veil.” The FX series – that will be available on the streaming service Hulu starting April 30 – looks at the troubled relationship between two women who play a deadly game on the road from Istanbul to Paris and London.

One woman has a secret, the other a mission to reveal it before thousands of lives are lost. Mission controllers at the CIA and French DGSE must put their differences aside and work together to avert potential disaster.

“This is fun to me. I felt like I had a lot of romance and a lot of comedy in this.  I had my fair amount of romance with Dali [Benssalah] and I had a lot of fun with Josh [Charles] as well,” Moss says. “So, to me, this was fun.  It wasn’t much more challenging than I’ve ever experienced given just the amount of different skills and different things I had to do with the dialect and the stunts and the fight training and speaking a couple different languages here and there and traveling all around the world.

“So, it definitely felt like I had found something even more challenging than ‘Handmaid’s’ which is impossible to say.  To me, this was a great time.  I loved it.”

The fun was getting to play an MI6 agent after working on the TV series “Mad Men” where she was part of the hectic world of advertising and an emotionally tortured woman in the feature film “The Invisible Man.” The role in “The Veil” did require Moss to perfect her British accent and that took months of training.  Moss doesn’t tend to do a lot of preliminary research for a role but “The Veil” put so much pressure on her to bring the character to life, Moss started working on the character six months before filming started.

Along with dealing with her British accent, Moss spent a lot of time preparing for the stunt work needed to handle fight scenes. She’s done fight sequences in the past but has generally played a character who had not been trained to fight.

Moss liked getting to play a trained fighter in three major fight sequences. She worked weeks in advance before each of those sequences.

The other attraction to taking on the role of Imogen Salter was that it gave the chance to work in the spy genre. Because she is such a major fan of those kind of productions, Moss had always wanted to play a spy.

“An MI-6 spy has like an extra bit of glamor to it which I was really excited about.  I did a lot of research beforehand; just reading a lot of books, any kind of female spy book I could get, I tried to read,” Moss says. “But the thing about spies is they don’t necessarily always want to talk to you about what they do.  So, it’s actually quite difficult to find them and get them to talk to you and tell you their secrets for obvious reasons.

“The CIA is much more willing to speak to you.  MI6, not so much.  Which is kind of cool.  I had to follow my instincts and just read what I could about male and female spies.”

In the end, Moss banked most of her performance on the scripts written by Steven Knight (“Peaky Blinders”). He got the core of the idea from Denise Di Novi who ended up an executive producer on the series.

Di Novi talked about how there was friction between the various intelligence agencies – MI6, GSE, and CIA – when it came to dealing with new threats. Knight took that idea and traveled to Paris where he met three people who worked in French intelligence.

“I just asked them what’s going on; what are the stories because I always find that the true stories are much more compelling.  So, I heard some stories, as one does.  As a dramatist, you take this character—sometimes you weld them together, sometimes you take one story and join it to another,” Knight says. “But it felt, to me, as if there’s something going on, and there is friction, and there is tension.

“The thing that appeals to me most is when big, big, big international conflicts, events, boil down to individuals.  What I wanted to do with this was to take huge issues and boil it down to two people in a car driving through the snow, and the nature of the conversation affects the outcome for thousands of people.”

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