Carrie-Anne Moss: ‘I cried and cried… my heart hadn't gotten tough yet'

Independent

09-03-2025

Forget about hacking into the Matrix: we're having issues just getting into Zoom. Sitting beside a log fire in her snow-capped New Hampshire home some 3,000 miles away from me is Carrie-Anne Moss, the woman known to millions as The Matrix 's hard-as-nails Trinity. In that film, and its three sequels, Moss's character was able to jack in and out of a complex digital universe; today, the computers just aren't playing ball. 'Some days are just like that,' she says, warmly, after we decide to sack the whole thing off and just pick up a telephone. 'You know what I mean? In our tech world… how did we ever survive before?'
The Matrix is, among many other things, a film of great and memorable voices, and while Moss's unruffled Canadian accent isn't as widely mimicked as the breathy angst of Keanu Reeves's Neo or the sonorous baritone of Laurence Fishburne's Morpheus, it comes down the phone now clear and recognisable. It's a voice I've heard many times before – albeit usually with a face attached – in a swathe of genre movies. Moss played the slippery Natalie in Christopher Nolan's amnesiac puzzle-box thriller Memento. She was the strict mother of Shia LaBeouf's troubled teen in the 2007 neo-noir Disturbia. In her latest film, the gritty and romantic zombie drama Die Alone, she is terrific as a battle-worn survivalist with a secret.
'Not only am I drawn to genre films, but they are drawn to me,' the 57-year-old says. 'As an actor, sometimes you want to play things that are so different, because you want to make sure you're versatile and all that. But I didn't mind being seen in a certain genre because there's so many stories to tell.'
In Die Alone, Moss plays the rough-edged Mae, a woman who has teamed up with a younger man (Douglas Smith) stricken with severe memory loss. Theirs is the sort of world where if the zombies don't get you, your fellow man probably will. The relationship between the two leads is, for much of the film, an enigma: it is a film of intrigue and twists, with a truly satisfying payoff.
'A lot of people have noted a similarity between Memento and this film,' says Moss. (Memento is famously told in reverse chronological order, and Guy Pearce's character suffers from amnesia.) 'I definitely felt that a bit in a few of the lines,' she adds. 'But not in the story at all. Ultimately, this is so different.'
The film makes the most of its small budget, with judicious use of non-CGI effects. 'It was very reminiscent of making independent films like in the early 2000s, for me,' Moss says. She is full of praise for the film's director, Lowell Dean, a 'kind, sweet' filmmaker who 'doesn't have a Hollywood bone in his body. He's just this guy making movies and loving them, caring about them. When movies have more hands in them, it's just a little different. It felt… simpler, I guess.'
I remember thinking, 'At the end of my life, will it matter to me that I have another movie on my résumé? Or will it matter to me that I held my baby?'
Just last year, Moss was one of the leads of the Star Wars spinoff The Acolyte, wherein she played a martial artist Jedi – billed as 'Trinity with a lightsaber'. She has the right sort of face for a Jedi master: strong cheekbones and a countenance that exudes no-nonsense wisdom. It's almost a shame that her character was killed off in the very first episode (though she later returned for flashbacks). That series, too, was dealt a fatal blow when Disney announced its cancellation in August last year. 'It's always disappointing when something doesn't get picked up,' says Moss. 'But I'm never really too shocked. This is the kind of business that's not for everybody – eventually you have to get pretty realistic about it.'
It isn't like she steeled up overnight; anyone who was part of the initial two Matrix sequels, Reloaded (2003) and Revolutions (2003), will be well acquainted with the industry's fickle nature. Those films were considered major let-downs after the phenomenon of the original (though they do, I should say, have their ardent defenders). The recent legacy sequel The Matrix Resurrections – a subversive and really quite brilliant modern blockbuster – underperformed at the box office and was met with unduly tepid reviews.
'It was an odd time,' Moss says of the recent sequel's release. 'They put it on some streaming platform [HBO Max]. But I really don't spend too much time thinking about what people think of things. I've always said this, and it's kind of cliché, but you only have control over your own experience. That film was really such a gift, and I loved making it.'
Before directors Lana and Lilly Wachowski recognised Moss's potential, few would have heard of her. She grew up in Vancouver and then modelled in Europe as a young adult. Her 1990s were a time of B-movies and TV roles, including, strangely, a regular stint on a Canadian TV series called Matrix (unrelated), as well as a plum role on the short-lived Melrose Place spin-off Models Inc. (1994-95). 'That was an exciting time for me,' she recalls. 'I was 25 or so, and had just moved to LA. I was learning a lot about the business, trying to understand a lot of different things. I got this initial feeling of, 'Oh, you could be on something that looks like it's gonna be huge!' And then it wasn't. That was a good lesson for me.'
Moss recalls that even after winning a role on a buzzy new soap opera, she had no financial security at the time. 'We did press for that before we even shot the show, and I was so broke,' she says. 'You're already promoting it, but you've got no money, and rent's due. But [ Melrose Place creator Aaron Spelling] knew that somehow, and gave me an advance. I remember thinking that was really generous.'
When the Wachowskis were casting The Matrix, Moss was a thoroughly left-field choice; it was partly her physical capability – the prowess with which she could execute many of the ambitious stunt sequences in the film – that swayed them. 'I can't even tell you how amazing it is to have gotten to play Trinity,' she says. 'To be the vessel for something like that. I got to physically embody her, but it's all [the Wachowskis].'
In recent years – and particularly since both Wachowski siblings came out as transgender women – The Matrix has been widely interpreted as a trans analogy, something the fourth film made even more overt. 'I wasn't really privy to that at the time,' says Moss. 'When The Matrix came out, everyone had these different interpretations, and I don't really want to [impose] my own opinion. But Lana and Lilly are so revered, loved – they made this series of films that's so inspiring, to so many people on so many levels. I can't tell you how many people I've met who've said, 'That movie changed my life.' That was super unique.'
After The Matrix came a brief run of high-profile projects, including Chocolat (2000), with Johnny Depp, and Memento. (She describes Nolan, then a fledgling filmmaker, as 'just super calm, capable, grounded… it's very rare I feel the sort of freedom he created on set'.) After the births of the three children (in 2003, 2005 and 2009) she shares with her husband, the actor Steven Roy, Moss's career took a backseat, but she did continue to work when her parenting duties allowed.
In the years before Resurrections, Moss would go on to have a few prominent roles – including a regular part in Marvel's Jessica Jones on Netflix. Most interesting, perhaps, is the one that got away. In 2008, Moss starred in a pilot for a series called Pretty/Handsome, created by TV's most prolific purveyor of pulp, Ryan Murphy (Nip/Tuck; Glee; American Horror Story). The series would have seen Moss play a woman whose husband (Joseph Fiennes) comes out as a trans woman. 'Ryan Murphy wrote this incredible pilot,' she says. 'I think it was just kind of before its time.
'It's funny,' she says. 'You know, when you're asking me about The Acolyte getting cancelled, and I said, 'Oh, you just expect it…' Pretty/Handsome? That one, when it didn't get picked up, I cried and I cried. I guess my heart hadn't gotten tough enough yet.'
Despite this, Moss is not one to dwell on the road not taken. 'After The Matrix was such a big deal, I took a big, big break to have children and be with them,' she says. 'I remember being torn, having a little twinge like 'Gosh, I'm getting offered such great things. That would be such a huge deal.' And I was holding my baby in my arms, and I remember thinking, 'At the end of my life, will it matter to me that I have another movie on my résumé? Or will it matter to me that I held my baby?' And I instantly thought, no. It was just a no-brainer. And I'm so glad I did that. I'm so glad I don't have that regret.'
If silence can sound like a smile, then I'm pretty sure I just heard a booming one. 'For my career, maybe not so much,' Moss adds, 'but that was the greatest decision I ever made in my life.'