Though 'Mad Men' comes to an end in April 2015, it's only the beginning for Elisabeth Moss. After successfully transitioning from child actress to respected thespian with her work on “West Wing,” her layered, assertive performance as Peggy Olson has turned her into an in-demand, dramatic commodity.
Deadline reports that Moss will costar alongside Robert Redford and Cate Blanchett in “Truth,” a docudrama chronicling the botched “60 Minutes II” investigation of the “Killian documents.” James Vanderbilt (“Zodiac,” “White House Down”) will write and direct the film, based on Mary Mapes” 2005 memoir “Truth And Duty: The Press, The President, And The Privilege Of Power”
After running four documents purporting George W. Bush's preferential treatment in the National Guard to help the sitting president avoid the Vietnam War draft, CBS, the “60 Minutes” staff, and reporter Dan Rather were left disgraced after the papers turned out to be fakes. Blowing up only two months before the 2004 Presidential Election, the scandal saw Mapes, then a producer on the show, fired and Rather shamed into retirement from CBS News, a job he held for 24 years.
Redford will play Rather in Vanderbilt's film, with Blanchett filling Mapes' shoes. Moss will reportedly play CBS veteran Lucy Scott, a Dallas journalism professor hired by Mapes as an associate producer “to 'run point' on the story controversy.” With the final season of 'Mad Men' behind her, Moss has been steadily jumping from project to project. After wrapping Reed Morano's “Meadowland,” and Ben Wheatley's “High Rise,” she'll next shoot Alex Ross Perry's “Queen of the Earth” before starring in a Broadway revival of “The Heidi Chronicles.” During Cannes, the actress also signed on to Bryan Bertino's horror film “There Are Monsters.”