Before she was an Emmy and Golden Globe-winning lead star, Elisabeth Moss was building her acting chops in smaller roles. In 1999, she co-starred with Angelina Jolie and Winona Ryder in the Oscar-winning film Girl, Interrupted. Now, Moss, 41, is opening up about what it was like to work on the acclaimed movie saying it was a little bit “intimidating.”
“There were two kind of camps. There was the Winona Ryder camp and the Angelina Jolie Camp,” Moss told Kelly Rip during the most recent episode of the Let’s Talk Off Camera podcast. Moss explained that the “camps” in question were “off camera but based on what was on camera,” and that she “was in the Winona Ryder camp and the Angelina Jolie camp was really cool.” She added, “Those were the really cool girls.”
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When asked if she “secretly want(ed) to be in” Jolie’s camp, Moss said she really didn’t because she “was so intimidated by” the group. Ripa inquired, “Did you say to her, “Why did you not let me into your camp?’” Moss replied, “No, I never brought it up. I’ve never brought it up, and I’m sure she would have no idea what I was talking about anyway. But I was definitely not cool enough to be in her camp.”
Girl, Interrupted follows the lives of a group of troubled women being held at Claymoore, a local psychiatric hospital, in the late 1960s. Moss plays Polly “Torch” Clark, a teenage burn victim who suffers from schizophrenia and is both “very childlike and easily upset.”
At one point, Georgina (Clea DuVall) — who is a pathological liar — tells Susanna (Ryder) that “Polly was admitted to Claymoore after her parents told her that she would have to give up her puppy because of her allergies to it, and in response she poured gasoline on the affected area and set it alight, leaving her face horribly scarred.” Later in the film, it’s revealed in Polly’s file that she was actually the victim of a house fire.
Reflecting on the film, Moss told Ripa, “I’ve spoken to Angelina since then and she’s lovely, but at the time it was just incredibly intimidating.”
