Elisabeth Moss Explains Why ‘Shining Girls’ Was A Mystery Even To Her

“It wasn’t a show where I was handed all eight episodes before we started,” explained Elisabeth Moss, the lead in Apple TV+’s Shining Girls. “It was still being written as we went along, so I found out what was happening as we were going through the process.”

She plays Kirby Mazrachi, a woman who teams up with a journalist after a murder is connected to an attack she suffered years before. The incident left her struggling to grasp onto a disorientating reality that appears to be constantly shifting. The six-part limited series, based on a novel by Lauren Beukes, premieres on the streamer on Friday, April 29, 2022.

I caught up with Moss to talk about what influenced the show’s tone and visuals, her feeling like she was a member of the audience, and compiling a dream team to pull the series off.

Simon Thompson: Shining Girls can be a very uncomfortable watch at times. Did you get that when you read the book and the script?

Elisabeth Moss: Definitely. I read the first script without having read the book, so I had no idea what it was about. I’m really glad that I had that experience because, from the get-go, I felt like I was in the audience’s chair. Subsequently, throughout the episodes, I kept reading and still felt the same way. I felt like I was experiencing it from the audience’s perspective. It wasn’t a show where I was handed all eight episodes before we started. It was still being written as we went along, so I found out what was happening as we were going through the process. I felt very much like I was seeing it from my character Kirby’s point of view. I was genuinely like, ‘What’s going to happen next?’ Sometimes I didn’t know, and that was exciting to experience. If there’s one thing that Shining Girls gives you, it is that you are desperate to know what happens next. Well, that’s unless you’re dead inside, and you don’t care. It’s full of cliffhangers.

Thompson: I spoke to Jamie Bell about the show and told him that it, at times, reminded me very much of some of David Fincher’s work. Did you get that vibe from it?

Moss: Yeah, absolutely. Fincher was a conscious choice in setting up the show’s visuals. It was a lot of Se7en, a lot of those 70s voyeuristic films too, like Klute and The Parallax View, there’s a bit of Spotlight and All The President’s Men sprinkled in, so we had very specific visual references, but Fincher tonally was very prevalent in setting up the show. It was very, very conscious. It’s different in many ways, but the visual look of the show, and the tone, were very much inspired by Fincher.

Thompson: When you do high concept projects, there is an increased creative risk, and a lot of success relies on making sure you get the right people for the job, in front of the camera and behind the camera. If you don’t, it can go horribly wrong. You’re an executive producer on this. How and when did you know all the right pieces were in place?

Moss: It started with the directors. That’s where we began. We needed really strong people to shepherd this because you’re absolutely right; it could go horribly wrong. With Michelle MacLaren with the first two episodes and then Dai
DAI
na Reid being added for four out of the eight, and they were also executive producers, there was a really strong base of smart people who were going to be able to tell this story. Then it was just layer upon layer of hiring the best people for the jobs with our DPs and with our production designer and composer and then, of course, the cast. You don’t hire everybody all at once, so one by one, we added who we felt was the best person for the job. We were lucky because the material was so good that we got the people we wanted. We didn’t get a lot of no. We wanted Jamie Bell, he loved the material, and we got Jamie Bell, so we were lucky in that sense. The only way to do it is to surround yourself and support the project with really smart storytellers.

Thompson: With Shining Girls, you had the scripts, you had the book, but when it came to additional research, did you talk to journalists? Did you talk to victims? It’s a dark world, so is that something you didn’t want to touch?

Moss: I hardly ever do any research, so that’s the only reason I didn’t. I’m extremely bad at it, and I’ve just never done it. It’s just not part of what I do. For some reason, it doesn’t help me. I was mainly concentrating on how to tell the story of somebody whose world was changing all the time. I had to invent it and use my imagination because who would I talk to about that? If they’re experiencing it, they’re not going to tell me, or they don’t remember, so there was nobody I could speak to and ask, ‘What’s it like if you walk into a room and everybody is different? Imagine nobody is there that was there before or if you look entirely different when you look in the mirror? I had no template for that, so I had to invent it along with what was happening in the scripts. That was the challenge.

Thompson: How do you decide what you want to put your name on as an executive producer and what you want to star in, which is a significant enough choice in its own way? Is it a personal choice? Is it a business decision?

Moss: It tends to be many factors. Right now, most things I do, I am a producer on because I tend to be involved in such a deep way that it doesn’t make sense for me not to be a producer on them. I tend to be involved really early. I’ve been involved in Shining Girls for three years, even before it was with Apple TV+. I like to make sure that what I fall in love within that script and the story that I and the showrunner or the director want to tell. I like to ensure that we’re retaining that throughout that process, which can be years. The best way to do that is to be a producer on the project and have that kind of control and say. At this point, I think that things I shepherd, around 90 percent of them I am a producer on. The times that I’m not producing are when it’s like Taika Waititi or Wes Anderson or someone, and I’m like, ‘You’re fine. You’re good. You don’t need me.’ (Laughs)

Shining Girls premieres on Apple TV+ on Friday, April 29, 2022.