“Who Peggy is eventually is what gets her to where she is,” Moss told BuzzFeed News of her Mad Men character.
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Elisabeth Moss has been acting for more than two decades, and as she's grown up on screen, she's been very careful about the women she's chosen to portray. "I have no interest in playing just the girlfriend or just the wife or anything like that," she told BuzzFeed News in a recent phone interview. "I'm very much interested in telling stories of complex human beings."
The latest complex human being she's taken on is Ashley in Alex Ross Perry's third feature film, Listen Up Philip, a photographer who's dealing with the dissolution of her relationship with incredibly narcissistic novelist Philip (Jason Schwartzman). "I felt like she was an interesting, complex, flawed, well-rounded character in her own right," Moss said of Ashley. "I loved the idea that you saw her relationship with Philip and that part of her life, but then you got to go see what effect that had on her life. And I loved the conceit, if you will, of showing the title character for the first 30, 40 pages or whatever, and then abandoning him and going off and showing this other character and then following her story."
Moss said she learned a lot from Ashley's story, so BuzzFeed News asked the actor to share the valuable lessons she's taken away from playing female characters who aren't defined by the men around them.
Ashley, Listen Up Philip
Tribeca Film
"In a way, what I was trying to portray was something I learned in my life from my own relationships," Moss said, noting that "it's very difficult to tell what you're learning from these characters and what you're putting into them."
"The thing that interested me about Ashley in that relationship and the consequent breakup was that idea that sometimes you have to get away from somebody before you realize how unhappy they make you," she said with a laugh. "And then, you get a break from them and you're like, Oh, wait. I'm actually pretty happy without you. This is actually better. I like it better when you're not here. You get so wrapped up in the drama of it and who's right and who's wrong and all of that kind of thing that you forget... One of my best friends has a great thing that she's said to me, which is, 'In a relationship, are you happy?' Because really, that's what it all comes down to. Does this person make you happy?"
In the end, Philip didn't do that for Ashley. "Regardless of whether they're a good person or a bad person or whatever, they're not good for each other. And that's, in the end, what matters," Moss said. "And I feel like that's something I learned from Ashley, honestly. For sure. And it's something that I kind of knew and I had experienced, but it was really sent home playing that character and having to analyze it in that way. And I think what's great is that, by the end of Ashley's story, she doesn't hate Philip. She's not even angry at him anymore. And I think that was one of the most interesting things for me — [it] is this idea of when you're truly over somebody, you're not even mad anymore. You don't even care. You're just like, You're just the way that you are, and I don't even care anymore. That's truly the sign that you're done," she said with a laugh.
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