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.
