Your other Elisabeth Moss TV obsession is coming back. The “Handmaid’s Tale” star reprises her role in “Top of the Lake’s” highly anticipated sophomore season, “China Girl,” and this time around, she’s joined by Nicole Kidman and “Game of Thrones’” Gwendoline Christie. The new season bowed in the UK July 27, but a U.S. premiere date was just announced over the weekend. The feminist murder-mystery will return to SundanceTV September 10 and run through September 12, Deadline writes. Season 2 consists of six episodes, three of which are helmed by creator Jane Campion.
“Top of the Lake: China Girl” takes place four years after the events of the first season, which followed Sydney-based police detective Robin Griffin (Moss) returning to her hometown in New Zealand to investigate the disappearance of a local 12-year-old girl. Season 2 is set in Sydney and centers around an unidentified murder victim whose body turns up at Bondi Beach.
A trailer for “China Girl” shows Robin meeting Mary (Alice Englert, “Ginger & Rosa”), the daughter she gave up for adoption many years ago. Kidman plays Julia, the teen’s adoptive mother. The women seem to bond over their disapproval of the girl’s boyfriend — and their objections are much more serious than his table manners. At a family dinner he announces that “the destiny of man is to enslave women.” So you can just imagine how he treats their daughter.
“For me, this season is so much about motherhood, and Robin’s, sort of, main challenge is to figure out how she’s going to be a mother to Mary, essentially somebody who is a stranger,” said Moss at a Television Critics Association (TCA) panel about the new season. The “Mad Men” alumna added, “Robin is, the entire season, faced with her own ideas of how life should be being challenged by [Miranda, by Mary, and by Christie’s character, Julia]. They are just constantly pushing her buttons and challenging her, and she has to kind of — the most important thing for her is to solve this case. It’s always the most important thing for her. And then in typical ‘Top of the Lake’ fashion, of course, the personal always kind of lines up with the political, and she has to kind of figure out both.”
Moss is up for an Emmy — her seventh nomination — for her role as Offred in “The Handmaid’s Tale.” Hulu renewed the dystopian drama for a second season just one week after the series premiered.
