Elisabeth Moss Plays ’10 Different Characters’ as The Veil’s Imogen – Hollywood Life

View gallery

Elisabeth Moss etched June Osborne into television history with The Handmaid’s Tale, but it was time for another venture with Hulu. The Emmy Award winner, 41, stepped into the complicated role of Imogen Salter for the upcoming spy-thriller series The Veil, describing the MI6 agent as “10 different” people in one character during an exclusive interview with Hollywood Life.

While reflecting on her character’s arc, Elisabeth noted that viewers will watch the many sides of Imogen unfold throughout all six episodes.

“I’ve always wanted to do [something in] the spy genre, but this was like that times 100 because Imogen is so many different people,” the Mad Men alum told Hollywood Life. “And the person that you meet at the beginning is the different person from the one you meet 10 minutes later, to the different person that you’ll meet in the second episode, so on and so forth. So, for me, it was like this opportunity to play 10 characters in one project.”

Per its synopsis, The Veil follows “a potentially deadly game of truth and lies as two women travel from Istanbul to Paris and London, with one of them possessing a secret that the other needs to expose.”

Since the show takes place on a more international scale than she’s worked on before, Elisabeth acknowledged there was a “lot of coordination” between the cast and crew. The actress also served as an executive producer alongside fellow EP Denise Di Novi, who called Elisabeth “a phenomenal producer.”

“I think the thing that was so different about The Veil was the international nature of it,” the Invisible Man star noted. “As an executive producer working with so many different languages, working between so many different countries, [people] having different ways of working, having to sort of bring all those people together and have one conversation was a challenge. Everyone did it so beautifully.”

In front of the camera, Elisabeth took on even more challenges — filming stunt scenes and perfecting her character’s British accent, which she recalled being the “biggest thing” for her to get a grip on.

“So, I did about six months of dialect work, and then I started training a couple months out,” the Golden Globe Award winner said. “I started physically getting in shape before that, but I started doing stunt training and fight training in Paris as part of our prep, and then just continued in Turkey and continued throughout the process. We had three big fights to learn. And so … [I] was just trying to train as much as I could.”

The first two episodes of The Veil will premiere on FX and Hulu on Friday, April 30.