Famously tight-lipped about her Scientology faith, The Handmaid’s Tale star Elisabeth Moss has opened up in a candid new interview.
Elisabeth Moss won’t delve into the specifics of her beliefs in Scientology, but she does think they perfectly align with her work on The Handmaid’s Tale, despite what critics may think.
“Listen, it’s a complicated thing because the things that I believe in, I can only speak to my personal experience and my personal beliefs. One of the things I believe in is freedom of speech,” she told The Daily Beast.
“I believe we as humans should be able to critique things. I believe in freedom of the press. I believe in people being able to speak their own opinions.
“I don’t ever want to take that away from anybody, because that actually is very important to me,” she continued. “At the same time, I should hope that people educate themselves for themselves and form their own opinion, as I have.
“The things that I believe in personally, for me, The Handmaid’s Tale, and the ability to do something that is artistically fulfilling but is also personally fulfilling, I’ve never had that.
Moss, 36, said taking away the right to talk about certain topics or believing in certain religions would cause society to turn into a place that mirrors Gilead, the fictional dystopia that serves as the setting for The Handmaid’s Tale.
“I don’t choose to talk about not just religion, but my personal life — who I’m dating and that kind of thing,” she said.
“ … I think people should be allowed to talk about what they want to talk about and believe what they want to believe and you can’t take that away — and when you start to take that away, when you start to say ‘you can’t think that,’ ‘you can’t believe that,’ ‘you can’t say that,’ then you get into trouble. Then you get into Gilead.
While the former West Wing star is passionate about her religion, there are also tenets of it in which she doesn’t believe, such as its history of having anti-LGBTQ views.