Carrie-Anne Moss
Carrie-Anne Moss is an actor, born 1967.
Carrie-Anne Moss was in her early thirties and working in Canadian television when the Wachowskis cast her as Trinity, which meant months of martial arts training before a frame was shot. The Matrix made her permanently iconic in a way that has not always been useful: leather, wire work, and a role whose emotional job is largely to believe in someone else.
Memento arrived the following year and contains the better performance. Natalie is a bartender who may be helping the man in front of her or steering him, and Moss plays both readings at once without tipping either one. It won her the Independent Spirit Award for Best Supporting Female. Snow Cake later won her a Genie, and neither film looks remotely like the one everybody knows her from.
The middle stretch is genre work of wildly uneven quality: Chocolat and Fido at one end, Red Planet, Disturbia, Silent Hill: Revelation and Pompeii at the other. Then Jeri Hogarth turned up. Across Jessica Jones, Iron Fist and The Defenders, Moss got to play a lawyer with no warmth and total competence, a rare Marvel part written for an adult, and it is the most sustained good work of her career. She returned to Trinity for The Matrix Resurrections, joined The Acolyte, and was nominated for a Canadian Screen Award for Die Alone in 2024, which suggests the interesting part of the career is not finished.
Movies (35)
- The Matrix (1999)
- Memento (2000)
- The Matrix Reloaded (2003)
- Silent Hill: Revelation 3D (2012)
- The Matrix Revolutions (2003)
- The Matrix Resurrections (2021)
- Chocolat (2000)
- Unthinkable (2010)
- Pompeii (2014)
- The Animatrix (2003)
- Disturbia (2007)
- Red Planet (2000)
- Normal (2007)
- The Bye Bye Man (2017)
- Die Alone (2024)
- The Crew (2000)
- Brain on Fire (2017)
- Unity (2015)
- Suspect Zero (2004)
- Fireflies in the Garden (2008)
- Snow Cake (2006)
- The Matrix Revisited (2001)
- Fido (2006)
- Confessions of an Action Star (2005)
- Mini's First Time (2006)
- Frankenstein (2015)
- Sabotage (1996)
- The Chumscrubber (2005)
- The Matrix Recalibrated (2004)
- Treading Water (2013)
TV (19)
- Chuck (2007)
- Marvel's Jessica Jones (2015)
- Humans (2015)
- FUBAR (2023)
- Tell Me a Story (2018)
- Crossing Lines (2013)
- The Acolyte (2024)
- FX: The Series (1996)
- Marvel's The Defenders (2017)
- Wisting (2019)
- Red Table Talk (2018)
- Dark Justice (1991)
- Models Inc. (1994)
- Vegas (2012)
- Marvel's Iron Fist (2017)
- Nightmare Cafe (1992)
- The Game Awards (2014)
- Matrix (1993)
- Pretty/Handsome
Where to start with Carrie-Anne Moss
Memento first. Natalie is the trickiest thing she has ever played, a woman whose kindness stays an open question for the length of the film, and it is a far harder job than the one she is famous for.
Then The Matrix, which needs no argument, though the sequels are for people who want the mythology rather than the film. The Matrix Resurrections is worth it only if you are already invested.
The real reason to go looking is Marvel's Jessica Jones. Jeri Hogarth is written as a shark and Moss plays her without a single bid for the audience's sympathy, which is why she is the best thing in a show with plenty of competition.
For the odd corners: Fido is a suburban zombie comedy that entirely works, Snow Cake is the small Canadian drama that won her a Genie, and Disturbia gets a real performance out of a teen thriller.
The Matrix films
Trinity opens the first film suspended in mid-air and changed what an action heroine was allowed to look like. Moss trained in wire work for four months before shooting a frame of it.
The Marvel Netflix run
Jeri Hogarth across three series is a genuinely unpleasant character played without any attempt to soften her, which that shared universe rarely allowed anyone to do with a recurring part.
The Canadian films
The work she went back to between studio pictures, and where the acting is. Snow Cake won her a Genie and Fido is a zombie comedy set in a nineteen-fifties suburb.
The thrillers
Memento arrived a year after The Matrix and won her an Independent Spirit Award for a part that keeps reversing on the audience. The rest is two decades of genre work.