with Moore besides Lebowski, praises Moore’s ability
to capture the tone of every film she’s in. This is true;
one of Moore’s gifts is her ability to inhabit a film,
rather than overwhelm it. But, honestly, she’s also just
fun to spend time with, Bridges says. “Some actors,
they want you to call them by the character’s name,
and they don’t engage that much,” he says. “But Julie is
very engaging. We love hanging out.” (The Dude can’t
help but tease at the possibility of a Lebowski sequel:
“I don’t know if that will ever happen, but whenever
we see each other, we like to fantasize about it.”)
I ask Moore about winning her Oscar, and what it
meant—if, after being nominated four times, includ-
ing twice in 2003, for supporting actress in The Hours
and best actress in Far From Heaven, it loomed, per-
haps heavily, as a goal. “You can’t have it as a goal,” she
says. “It can’t be. It’s a marker. I remember somebody
asked Jodie Foster about winning an Oscar, and she
said, ‘Oh, my God, it was such a relief.’” Moore smiles.
“I laughed, because that is how it feels. You have towork for the work. You have to like the process and like
doing it because you like doing it. And yet our culture
has these competitions and these prizes...so on one
hand, it feels like, Phew.
“On the other hand, it’s like, Are you kidding? Did
that actually happen to me?” She’d grown up watching
the Oscars on TV like everyone else. “The fact that I
ended up being part of that show was way beyond any-
thing I could have ever anticipated.”
After all her successes, Moore maintains a new-
comer’s perspective. “It’s hard to continue to be
employed, continue to do work that interests you,” she
says. “I talk about that with my kids all the time. As
they’re making choices...I’m like, If you’re lucky to find
something that interests you and to be able to pur-
sue it, that’s fantastic. That’s what you want. That’s a
measure of success if you’re doing something that you
really enjoy and then you manage to get paid, because
that’s not a given.”
This is a volatile time in filmmaking—the revivalMORE OF MOORE
“It feels like my choices
have been varied enough
that there’s something
for different audiences,”
says Moore. Fleur du
Mal dress, Michael Kors
Collection stole and
Tiffany & Co. bracelet.
Opposite: Michael
Kors Collection dress,
Cartier High Jewelry
bracelet and Tom Ford
shoes. Hair, Serge
Normant; makeup, Mark
Carrasquillo; manicure,
Alicia Torello; set
design, Nicholas Des
Jardins. For details see
Sources, page 150.Freundlich, who has directed his wife in four films,
including After the Wedding, is amazed by Moore’s eye
for authenticity—how she can immediately home in
on the accuracy, or the lack thereof, in a character or
a script. “She can pick it up and recognize it,” he says.
“That’s partly how she makes her decisions about
what she does. She’s either drawn to something right
away or not.”
Moore’s friend, the fashion designer and director
Tom Ford, confirms her meticulousness. “Nothing
escapes her,” says Ford, who’s famously assiduous
himself. “She’s a perfectionist who will push herself
to deliver a perfect performance.” Ford holds the dis-
tinction of dressing Moore for many events, including
the Oscars, and also directing her; he wrote the part
of Charlotte in his debut film, A Single Man, specifi-
cally for Moore and says her signing on helped make
the movie happen. “I’m incredibly grateful to her for
trusting me,” he says.
Jeff Bridges, who has starred in two other films
117houses that once inspired Moore are all but extinct,
and the industry is being reshaped by digital play-
ers like Netflix and Amazon. Moore sees a silver
lining in the disruption: As the old gatekeepers fade
from power, different stories are finally getting told.
“Experience is not monolithic,” Moore says. “It’s not
the one white guy deciding. I remember I was listening
to somebody talk about a movie, it was a big commer-
cial film, and some guy was saying, ‘I just didn’t like it,’
and I was like, ‘It’s not for you. It’s for 12-year-old girls.
That’s why you don’t like it.’ You don’t have to like
everything. This idea that there’s one critical point of
view, or one storyteller, limits the stories.
“There’s always going to be [desire] for storytell-
ing,” Moore says. “I do think there’s a tremendous
amount of talent out there.... Where there’s talent and
people telling stories, they’re going to find a way to
do them.”S
UCH OPTIMISM ALSO informs Moore’s
activism, even when the cause is deeply
serious. In addition to her public support of
Time’s Up and its high-profile anti-harass-
ment work, she’s been a strong voice for
gender pay equality. Moore’s work in gun
violence prevention, meanwhile, stretches back to the
horrific shooting in 2012 at Sandy Hook Elementary
School in Newtown, Connecticut. Moore recalls the
futile agony of trying to shield the Sandy Hook news
from Liv, who was 10 at the time, only to have her
daughter eventually turn and ask, “Mommy, did a
bunch of little kids get shot today?” It made Moore
realize: The way to protect her children wasn’t to hide
tragedy from them. It was to try to do something to
stop it. “Culturally, people were loath to speak about
the Second Amendment and guns, because somehow
it was taboo,” Moore says. “It was taboo because the
[National Rifle Association] has made it taboo, claim-
ing people were un-American if they were talking
about this kind of stuff. So, I was like, “All right, so if
[the NRA] has managed to wage this public relations
campaign from their end, why don’t I have the people
in my community—our community—speaking up?”
This led to Moore’s involvement with Everytown
for Gun Safety, the Michael Bloomberg–founded
nonprofit seeking common-sense, bipartisan solu-
tions on gun issues, as well as Moms Demand Action,
Watts’s grass-roots arm of Everytown, which helped
influence Facebook to end all unlicensed gun sales
arranged on its platform. Not long before our inter-
view, Walmart made a public appeal to its customers
in open-carry states to not bring weapons into its
stores and announced new rules on ammunition
sales. “That’s success,” Moore says. “That’s Moms
Demand [Action], people saying, ‘Hey, we would like
to shop in your stores.’ If you have an opportunity to
effect change by what you purchase, why not? We’re
in a capitalist society.”
Whenever a famous actor or musician becomes
politically active, there’s usually blowback: Who do
they think they are, telling me what is going on? Moore
says it didn’t make her hesitate. “I felt like I was fol-
lowing all these activists and moms—Shannon Watts
in particular,” she says. “I feel like I’m an acolyte: How
can I help her; how can I help them?”
Moore wrote the foreword to Watts’s recent book,Fight Like a Mother, and Watts says it’s not uncommon
for Moore to show up at smaller out-of-state events.
“When I started doing this work in 2012, there were
very few people who waded into this issue willingly,”
Watts says. “Julianne waded in willingly and has
never looked back. I think it took a courageous woman
who realized: If we lose our children, we have nothing
left to lose.”
Lately, Moore’s activism has merged with her pro-
fessional life. Not long ago, she completed filming The
Glorias (out in January 2020), in which she, Ryan Kiera
Armstrong, Alicia Vikander and Lulu Wilson play the
iconic feminist Gloria Steinem at different stages of
her life. Steinem was an adviser on the movie, which
is directed by Julie Taymor, and appears in it; Moore
says she’d never met Steinem before but came away
inspired. “She’s just as glorious as you’d imagine,”
Moore says. “She’s very smart, which goes with-
out saying, but she’s also incredibly thoughtful and
patient and tolerant. Her ability to not be rash, and tospeak to people who are very different than she is and
not judge is really exemplary. You literally think, OK,
what would Gloria Steinem do? How would she handle
this situation? Because she’d handle it beautifully.”
(Steinem returns the compliment to Moore: “She’s a
miracle of intelligence and empathy.”)
It’s late in the afternoon. The photo crew is almost
gone, and Moore and I are close to the last ones left in
the townhouse. I ask Moore what she considers a per-
fect day in New York City, and she tells a story about a
recent Sunday when the kids were elsewhere and she
and Freundlich walked across downtown for brunch,
and along the way they kept running into friends.
They stopped by an old pal’s house. They went to a
spice shop in the East Village. They ran into some kids
who’d gone to school with their children. It was one of
those appointment-free days in the city that blur into
something magical. “You just walk, walk, walk, and it
feels like a small town, because it kind of is,” Moore
says. “I think that’s pretty perfect.” Ǖ