Jacqueline Joe and Moss. (
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The trappings will seem familiar: A young girl in peril by a mountainside lake. A young , seemingly frail, female detective so committed to solving a case that she neglects her fiancé and her family. A police force that’s in no particular hurry to solve the crime at hand.
“Top of the Lake,” a new Sundance miniseries debuting tomorrow night, shares enough elements with AMC’s “The Killing” to sound like an homage, at the very least. There are several important differences, though. “Top of the Lake” is only six episodes, not a serialized drama like the recently resurrected, Vancouver-based “Killing.” And the series was written and directed by acclaimed filmmaker Jane Campion (“The Piano”), whose films seamlessly mix the beautiful and the savage in a given landscape.
The series stars someone we think we know – American actress Elisabeth Moss, the beloved Peggy Olson of AMC’s “Mad Men.” Here, Moss plays Aussie detective Robin Griffin who is determined to find Tui Mitcham (Jacqueline Joe), a 12-year-old pregnant girl who’s gone missing. Robin is the opposite of Peggy, emotional rather than circumspect, and Moss says getting the role was not a slam-dunk. She was willing to live in New Zealand for five months of filming and take three months before production started to get a credible accent with the help of dialect coach Victoria Neufeld just for the chance to work with Campion, whose skill with actresses brought Holly Hunter a Best Actress Oscar for “The Piano.”
“Jane was like, ‘No. I can’t see [Peggy from “Mad Men”] as this character,’” Moss says. “I had the same reservation.”
Moss is a petite 5-feet-3 and says she was inspired to try out for the role by other slightly built actresses who fared well as law enforcers, such as Jodie Foster in “Silence of the Lambs” and Mireille Enos in “The Killing.” Once it was hers, she watched female cop TV such as TLC’s “Police Women” documentary series and started working out.
“I didn’t want to look like Hilary Swank in ‘Million Dollar Baby,’ ” says Moss, 30. “I just wanted to feel stronger and tougher.”
The investigation into the disappearance of the young pregnant girl does not follow a linear narrative, so “Top of the Lake” does not play like “CSI: New Zealand.” One unlikely subplot involves an encampment of distressed women of a certain age who are following a weird, gray-haired guru named GJ (Hunter). She is modeled after a woman Campion once followed herself. ‘Jane’s a very kind of open-minded, very spiritual person into meditation and the search for the truth and all that,” Moss says.
The case also brings Robin face-to-face with her own dreadful past and an assortment of extremely rough local men, one or more of which may have fathered the baby that the missing girl is carrying. This crew, headed by the sneering Matt Mitcham (Peter Mullan), make the randy cads in the ad world of Peggy Olson works in seem like Sir Galahad.
“The guys in this show make the men on ‘Mad Men’ look like feminists,” she says. “These men will kill you. I’ll take being hit on by Don Draper any day.”
Moss called from Los Angeles while filming episode 11 of the sixth season of “Mad Men,” the Matthew Weiner drama that has brought her several Emmy nominations. With the end of the show in sight, Moss says “You start panicking” about the next job. She would be tempted to spread her wings beyond television if the medium didn’t have so many good roles for actresses.
‘Television is so good right now. The writing is so great,” she says. “The miniseries is the unsung hero of our business. You get the episodic nature of a series but then it’s over. I think it’s great for actors.”
And Moss has no time for TV actors who would give you the impression that they go home after a day on the set and read T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land”.
“I’m a huge watcher of TV. I think people who don’t have televisions are stupid,” she says. “TV is awesome and you should invest in one.”
TOP OF THE LAKE
Monday, 9 p.m., Sundance