Elisabeth Moss offered this Aussie a plum Shining Girls gig, then apologised

Daina Reid and Elisabeth Moss are close – “we have fun, we’ve had dinner” – but the Australian director insists it would be a stretch to say she and her Shining Girls star were besties.

“It’s a work relationship,” Reid says. “I mean, I adore her and I respect her so much. She’s one of the brightest, most insightful, hard-working actors I’ve ever met and, yeah, we muck around. But I always hold it as a professional relationship of, I hope, mutual respect.”

Elisabeth Moss as aspiring reporter Kirby Mazrachi in Shining Girls.Credit: Apple TV+

The credits suggest she’s on safe ground there. Reid has directed Moss in two seasons of The Handmaid’s Tale, and was due to mentor her as a director on a third (season 4) – on which she would have directed her in a couple more episodes, too – until COVID intervened.

In return, Moss had agreed to play the lead in Reid’s debut feature, the Hannah Kent-scripted thriller Run Rabbit Run, until COVID wrecked that plan too.

“She’s too busy, back to back to back, so she could never have done it after all the delays,” Reid says. “She really wanted to do it, but it just wasn’t coming together, and finally I just had to say the name ‘Sarah Snook’ and she went, ‘Oh, OK’.”

With Moss gracefully bowing out, Reid shot Rabbit with Snook in the lead late last year, and is currently working on the edit. But today she’s talking about Shining Girls, the supernatural thriller starring Moss on which the Australian directs four of the eight episodes.

Daina Reid directs Wagner Moura and Elisabeth Moss in Shining Girls.Credit: Apple TV+

When Moss got in touch about Shining Girls – which combines serial-killer gore, journalistic sleuthing and time travel to uncanny and impressive effect – she was “very apologetic”, says Reid. The reason: the coveted set-up episodes – in which a director gets to establish the look, tone and pace of a series – had already been offered to veteran Michelle MacLaren.

But Reid insists she couldn’t have been happier. The former actor, who grew up in Perth but has lived and worked in Melbourne since the late 1990s, professes herself a “massive fan” of MacLaren, a pioneer among female TV directors in the US.

“I used to love The X Files but it was always directed by men,” Reid says. “And one night as I was watching Michelle’s name come up, and I remember standing up and going ‘there it is, a female director’.”

To share directing duties with MacLaren and Moss – who helm two episodes each – “was just such a buzz for me. I talked to Michelle, I could compare notes. I just couldn’t believe that I got that opportunity after watching her for so long”.

Jamie Bell as creepy drifter Harper Curtis in Shining Girls.Credit: Apple TV+

There were days when all three would be shooting at the same time in order to get the maximum value out of an expensive location, such as the planetarium that features prominently throughout the series (and which hints at a kind of multiverse aspect to the story).

“One of us would have one scene there, one would have lots, so we would all kind of tag team as we came in and did our scenes. ‘Hey, thanks, won’t be long, I promise’,” Reid recalls with a laugh. “But of course, Elisabeth Moss was there the whole time. She’s acting in mine, she’s acting in Michelle’s, and she’s directing and acting in her own. Some of those days were pretty crazy.”

The three shared executive producer duties too, which in this case meant nutting out the rules of the strange speculative-fiction universe writer Silka Luisa had created from the 2013 novel by Lauren Beukes, a universe in which a man (played by Jamie Bell, who really has come a long way since starring as Billy Elliott 22 years ago) has the ability to travel back and forth in time to stalk, taunt and select his female victims.

Reid describes herself as “a bit of a sci-fi nerd” and says the opportunity to work on material like this was one of the main reasons she decided to try her hand in the US after two decades working on some of Australian television’s biggest dramas (The Secret Life of Us, Paper Giants, Howzat!, Offspring).

“It was great fun to be in there nerding out the whole story, the whole trajectory, the whole mythology, and getting into heated debates about time travel, which was hilarious because it’s not real,” she says. “It’s so convoluted, and so paradoxical, it doesn’t work.”

But there’s a lot more going on in Shining Girls than mere genre fiction, however complicated. Moss’s Kirby (or is it Sharon?) is the sole survivor of an attack by Bell’s Harper, and that may be why her reality keeps shifting around her. She notices the changes – her hair has changed colour, length and style; someone else is sitting at her desk in the office; she no longer lives in the same apartment she used to; her hard-living rocker mum (Amy Brenneman) is now a Gospel-singing Christian pastor – but no one else does.

“It is very much a parable about trauma, and how an event happens and you’re irrevocably changed,” says Reid. “The path you are on, the life you might have led, is no longer, your mental health, everything about you, is different and you’re learning your new self.”

Against that is the strange source of Harper’s power, which is finally revealed in episode six. “He’s an unremarkable man, snuffing out the lives of remarkable women,” says Reid. “The only thing he has is the power that’s not really his, that he just happened to stumble upon … it’s white male privilege.”

Shining Girls is on Apple TV+. Episode 5 drops on Friday, May 13 and episode 6 on May 20.

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