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Moore says. “What’s so funny is that there are all
those families that are like, ‘What? You want to be
an actor? Are you kidding? Get a real job!’ When [Cal]
wanted to play basketball I was like, ‘What? You want
to play sports? What about music?’”
She laughs. She remembers her own early dreams,
of course. Moore’s true cinematic education as a
student at Boston University would occur in the
darkness at the nearby Coolidge Corner Theatre, a
revival house where she saw Catherine Deneuve and
Gérard Depardieu in The Last Metro, David Lynch’s
Eraserhead and Divine in Pink Flamingos.
“You could see anything,” Moore says. “I remember
I saw a double bill of Straw Dogs and Emmanuelle.” She
watched her first Altman movie there, 3 Women, and
thought, I want to do this kind of work.
The crazy part was, Moore would do exactly that,
working for the celebrated director in 1993’s Short
Cuts. In the Julianne Moore origin story, that moment
looms large—in the space of roughly two years, she
went from Altman to Malle’s Vanya on 42nd Street to
Haynes’s Safe, in which she played a woman grappling
with multiple chemical sensitivities, and there’s an
assumption her career took off like a rocket. Sitting
here with me, Moore corrects the record, noting that
Safe was anything but a hit when it was released in
- “It got killed,” she says. “People walked out of the
theater. By the end of the ’90s, people were calling it
one of the best films of the decade, but it got killed. The
Big Lebowski got killed too.”
This is a lovely thing, in a way: to have had such a
fruitful career that it all just blurs into something
good. Moore, who is 58, has appeared in more than
70 movies. It’s a breathtaking run of depth and range.
You probably remember her in The Kids Are All Right,
because it wasn’t so long ago, or The Hunger Games,
because your kids adored it. But do you remember
Moore was also in The Fugitive? She was in Children of
Men. Boogie Nights. The Hand That Rocks the Cradle!
She’s been in so many memorable films, it’s possible to
forget even some of the best ones.
I ask Moore which movie people ask her about the
most. “It depends on the individual,” she says. “There
will be people who just want to talk about The Big
Lebowski, talk about The Hours, talk about Still Alice...
and then every once in a while, you’ll get someone
who’ll come up and say, ‘My kids love you in The Lost
World: Jurassic Park.’ It makes me happy, because it
feels like my choices have been varied enough that
there’s something for different audiences.”
This past year, Moore appeared in a pair of films
that, at first glance, couldn’t be more different: Gloria
Bell , director Sebastián Lelio’s meditation on middle
age, in which Moore played the title character jug-
gling the stresses and triumphs of ordinary life;
and After the Wedding, in which Moore starred as a
wealthy executive mulling an act of philanthropy to an
orphanage managed by a character played by Michelle
Williams. It’s the kind of work that Moore likes—
dense, complicated, colored in shades of gray rather
than dramatic black and white. “There are no heroes
and no villains,” Moore says, quoting a line Freundlich
uses to describe After the Wedding.
“I’m compelled by stories where it shifts depending
on whose perspective it is, how [characters] all believe
their own stories the way we do,” she says.
GOLDEN MOMENT
“You have to work for
the work. You have to
like the process and like
doing it because you like
doing it,” Moore says
on winning an Oscar.
“And yet our culture
has these competitions
and prizes...so on one
hand, it feels like, Phew.”
Versace dress
and Bulgari earrings.