Elisabeth Moss Turns Super Spy in ‘The Veil’—Part Espionage Thriller, Part ‘Thelma & Louise’

The Veil almost didn’t come Moss’s way. Knight started writing after power producer Denise Di Novi (Edward Scissorhands, Little Women) floated a kernel of a premise to him: exploring the friction between intelligence agencies of different nations. Some exhaustive research later, and Knight had a vibrant, witty spy thriller centered on two mysterious women. “I gave Steve maybe a four-line idea, and then he came back to me with all of these relationships—it was wild to me,” Di Novi says. She wanted Moss from the get-go, but everyone involved told her, “Do not waste time, we want to get this going right away, she gets offered everything.” Undeterred, Di Novi reached the actor eventually—and Moss, looking for a project to take on during her Handmaid’s Tale hiatus, said yes swiftly after reading the script.

Moss shakes her head over Zoom as she listens to Di Novi recount the difficulty to simply make an offer. “The idea that it may not have come my way because somebody said that I may not want to do it is so terrifying,” says Moss, also an executive producer on The Veil. “It’s my worst nightmare.”

The Veil opens with Moss’s Imogen posing as a British NGO worker at a refugee camp on the border of Syria and Turkey. We glean, rather quickly, that this is not exactly who she is. A woman known as Adilah El Idrissi (Yumna Marwan) is being targeted by the community, who identify her as a notorious ISIS commander, and Imogen narrowly focuses on her predicament, promising to get Adilah to safety. Before long, they’ve escaped together, on the road to Istanbul, then Paris, then who knows—with Imogen vying to ascertain Adilah’s true motives and background, under supervision from both French and American intelligence agencies, before it’s too late. The conflicts and allegiances that arise between the two women reveal themselves as far more complex than the surface would indicate, reflective of a global power order in chaos.