Other film credits from this time include Steven Soderbergh's Traffic (2000), which earned Moffett a Screen Actors Guild Award for Outstanding Performance by a Cast in a Motion Picture, and the coming-of-age drama Thirteen (2003).

[3] After attending Stanford University, where he majored in international relations, Moffett returned to Chicago and began working as an investment banker.

[3][4] Moffett was unhappy with this career, and later reflected: "About halfway through my tenure at the bank, it became hellishly evident that going to a bar near the Board of Trade building to have double gimlets with secretaries was not my idea of life.

[6] He then starred opposite Brad Davis in the original stage production of Larry Kramer's The Normal Heart in 1985, playing a gay man dying of AIDS,[7] for which he won critical acclaim.

[2] He also starred opposite Aidan Quinn and Gena Rowlands in the television film An Early Frost, which also dealt with two male lovers during the HIV/AIDS crisis.

[9] He subsequently starred in the thriller film Lisa (1990), playing a serial killer whom a teenage girl becomes enamored with, unaware he is a dangerous predator.

From 2011 to 2012, Moffett starred in the comedy series Happily Divorced as Elliot, an on/off love interest of the main character played by Fran Drescher.