Elisabeth Moss recalled how the power dynamics of Girl, Interrupted played out even after “cut!” was yelled.
Moss, 41, played Polly “Torch” Clark, a burn victim with schizophrenia, in the 1999 film, which featured an ensemble cast including Winona Ryder, Clea DuVall, Jared Leto, Brittany Murphy and Angelina Jolie, the last of whom won the Oscar for Best Supporting Actress for her portrayal of Lisa Rowe.
In a Wednesday, May 1, interview on the “Let’s Talk Off Camera With Kelly Ripa” podcast, the actress, who was “like, 15 or 16” when she filmed Girl, Interrupted, told Ripa, 53, about the experience.
“My mom was still with me going to set,” Moss recalled. “We were shooting in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. I was with all these movie stars. It was Winona Ryder! And Angelina Jolie!”
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Moss described the set as like “being dropped into The Wizard of Oz” and described costars Ryder and Jolie, both in their mid-20s at the time, as being “so different.”
“There were two camps,” Moss said. “There was the Winona Ryder camp and the Angelina Jolie camp.”
Moss said the camps broke off “based on what was on camera,” meaning she found herself in Ryder’s camp.
“I was so intimidated by the Angelina Jolie camp,” she remembered. “I had no thoughts of ever being able to be in that camp. It was so cool. It was all the cool girls.”
Years later, Moss said she spoke to Jolie, now 48, and called her “lovely,” but admitted “at the time, it was just incredibly intimidating.”
When Ripa, 53, asked Moss whether she brought up the two camps to Jolie, Moss laughed and said, “I never brought it up. I’m sure she would have no idea what I was talking about anyway.”
In reminiscing about the movie, Moss also detailed how her face prosthetics would take “about three hours every morning.”
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The prosthetics, made to look like Moss’ face had been badly burned, made for quite the interesting experience when Moss ventured off-set with her camp leader.
“I would forget that I had [the prosthetics] on,” she told Ripa. “You wouldn’t take it off at lunch or anything. I would go with Winona, because we became kind of good friends, I would go with her to the store or something. People on set thought that that was actually what I looked like.”
It wasn’t until later that everybody realized the young actress wasn’t actually a burn victim herself.
“I wasn’t famous. Nobody knew who I was,” she explained. “So the crew actually thought, unfortunately, that had really happened to me. It took a long time for them to realize it was not real. They did such a good job.”
