BEVERLY HILLS — Though she's been acting most of her life, Elisabeth Moss figures she's fortunate she's never been famous. That streak of luck may have run out as Moss maneuvers her naive secretary, Peggy, from AMC's "Mad Men" into new adventures and a second season.

"I was about 6 when I started but I wasn't a 'child actress' because I didn't really do some huge thing that made everybody know who I was," she says in a congested hotel restaurant.

"So I was able to just work and get better and improve and work with other amazing people that I could learn from, to where I could get to the place where I had the right role and the right people and the right show and be able to do what I had learned."

Moss also studied ballet for 10 years starting when she was a moppet of 5. "I went back and forth between those two. And at 15, I decided to just go with acting because it was more fulfilling for me," says Moss, who was dressed in a fire-engine red, knit mini-dress.

Her years of comfortable anonymity may be over because of the engrossing role as the tenderfoot who begins to climb the corporate ladder in "Mad Men."

When she first read the script she knew the role of Peggy fit like a Speedo.

"She was perfect for me," she says, grinning. "It was a perfect fit, and I loved playing her from the first audition. I loved that role! The first audition it was executive producers Matt (Weiner) and Scott (Hornbacher) and Alan Taylor, who directed the pilot, and the casting director. I auditioned twice for it and it was one of those really cool moments where it just fits. And you know it works and they know it works and it's one of those, 'OK, this is good.'

"I walked out of the room and called my manager and said, talking about Matt, I said, 'I could work with him. I would work with him. I would sign that contract for however many years if I could totally work with that man.' And that was it."

Moss, 25, continues to indulge the vivid imagination that dogged her childhood. She used to play "library" on the staircase and coax her family into checking out books. When she was 5, she planted an imaginary garden in the backyard, using only sticks in the ground as her seedlings.

"I would read a book like 'Little House in the Prairie' and for a month pretend I was in 'Little House in the Prairie' with detail — riding horses and I had a farm and had a huge imagination that, in an obvious way, led into the acting thing.

"I was very serious about my playing."

She's always been serious about her work, too. When she was 13, she left L.A. for New York on her own to study with the School of American Ballet. Though she stayed in a dorm, she was essentially alone in the big city. Her parents — both artists — supported her passions.

Her father manages jazz musicians and her mother plays the blues harmonica. "They're both very successful at what they do. I think they were happy I went into the arts. I think they were happy I didn't become a musician," she says, then giggles.

It was her role as the president's daughter on "The West Wing," that brought Moss the attention that had evaded her most of her life.

"It was the biggest thing I'd been a part of. ... I went from 17 to 24 on that show. Besides what I did on the outside of my career, what it did for me personally is I got to work with all these incredible actors who'd been in the business for so long. ... And I got to kind of play with them — as a 17-, 18-year-old you don't get that, especially on television."