Elisabeth Moss / The Invisible Man
Elisabeth Moss has a come a long way from the time she walked into the studio set of Mad Men as a timid young actress taking on her first major role. More than a decade later, the 37-year-old actress is riding a wave of critically-acclaimed performances in both film and TV. In recent years, her work in the limited TV series The Handmaid’s Tale has garnered her international acclaim as well as two Emmy nominations and a Golden Globe award as best actress. In 2018, she co-starred in the indie comedy/drama The Square which won the coveted Palme d’Or at Cannes.
Now she’s about to be seen in THE INVISIBLE MAN, based on the classic H.G. Wells classic which was famously turned into a 1933 film starring Claude Rains. In this latest screen adaptation, Moss plays Cecilia Kass, a woman trapped in a violent, controlling relationship with a wealthy and brilliant scientist, portrayed by Oliver Jackson-Cohen [The Haunting of Hill House]. When Cecilia’s abusive ex dies by suicide and leaves her a generous portion of his vast fortune, she suspects he has staged his death. After some close friends come under threat, Cecilia’s sanity begins to unravel as she desperately tries to prove that she is being hunted by someone no one can see.
Much of the emotional anxiety and oppressive intensity of the film comes from the process of “gaslighting,” a term that originated with the classic Hollywood movie “Gaslight” directed by George Cukor and describes the process by which Charles Boyer terrorises Ingrid Bergman to the point of insanity.
“A lot of my friends have had that experience of gaslighting,” Moss says. “That feeling of not being believed, not being heard or being scrutinised for believing something you know in your heart to be true is something I think on varying levels we can all identify with.”
“In recent years we’ve learnt that the psychological abuse suffered by women can be just as harmful as physical abuse, and that men in positions of power can be very manipulative. It takes a long time for women to recover and overcome that and that’s why we wanted to show how my character Cecilia suffers from both forms of abusive behaviour”…