PHOTOGRAPHY BY DAVID ROEMER/TRUNKARCHIVE.COM/SNAPPER MEDIA; GETTY IMAGES; INSTAGRAM/@JULIANNEMOORE.66 marieclaire.com.auand you’d have to hand your baby to some guy
you didn’t know! I was standing there going [in
a scream], ‘Just take her, just take her!’ She was
this crazy little baby with crazy hair.”
Now, Liv is 15. “I can’t believe it,” sighs
Moore. Son Caleb is 19 and has already left for
college. “It was agony,” she cries. “Great for him.
Agony for us.” Both her kids have shown little
interest in acting, despite many of their friends
heading in that direction. Caleb is friends with
Lucas Hedges, the rising star who won an Oscar
nomination this year for Manchester by the Sea.
“Lucas spent a lot of time sitting on my couch
having drinkable yoghurts as a teenager,” she
says. Now he’s an actor. “But my kids? No.”
Moore’s own upbringing was unconven-
tional. Born Julie Anne Smith at the Fort Bragg
army base in North Carolina, she spent her early
years shipped from Paris to Panama, relocating
to wherever the army stationed her father, Peter.
“It makes you adaptable,” she says. “You are
always trying to fit in.” Moore claims she grew
up as “the kid who’s too short, the kid who wears
glasses, the kid who’s not athletic” – a far cry from
the roles that cement her status as a classic
beauty: brand ambassador for L’Oreal Paris and
the face of Triumph’s Florale lingerie range.
With a childhood that demanded constant
reinvention, it was no surprise that she found
her calling in acting, although never in her wild-
est dreams did she imagine just how successful
she would become. “When you start out, your
ambition is to just get a job,” she says. The inno-cence of youth was enough to
spur her on. “When you’re young,
you don’t know enough to know
how impossible it’s going to be.”
Changing her name because
another actress was already reg-
istered under Julie Anne Smith,
Moore moved to New York in her
20s after studying in Boston.
Off-Broadway shows were fol-
lowed by a recurring role as two
half-sisters on soap As the World
Tu r n s. But it was in movies that
she flourished, making impres-
sions in daring projects such as
Boogie Nights, playing a porn star, and more
mainstream features such as Jurassic Park
sequel The Lost World. Diversity is still key.
Now she returns in Clooney’s black comedy
Suburbicon and, after that, Wonderstruck, the
latest film from Todd Haynes, who directed her
in Safe and Far from Heaven. After her recent
turn as the villainess in Kingsman: The Golden
Circle, it’s been an especially rewarding period.
“What was nice about this year for
me was the flexibility of my roles,”
she says. “That feels good. It feels
good for anybody; it feels good for
women ... men, for actors. We’re
looking for opportunities to play a
part. I don’t think you ever want to
play an archetype ... [or] yourself.”
Curiously, in both films – like
her daytime soap beginnings –
she’s taken on dual roles. In the
era-straddling piece Wonderstruck,
based on the children’s book by
Brian Selznick, Moore is Lillian
Mayhew, a silent film star from the
1920s, and also a woman named
Rose living in 1970s New York. In
Suburbicon, she plays twins: the
blonde Rose Lodge, wheelchair
bound after a car accident, and the
brunette Margaret, who – it turns
out – has been scheming with Rose’s
husband Gardner (Matt Damon).
Behind Sub urbic on’s whiteFrom top to bottom:
Moore balances time
with her family –
husband Bart Freundlich
and their children Liv
and Caleb (at a premiere
in 2016); and famous
friends, including fashion
designer Karl Lagerfeld;
and fellow actress
Kristen Stewart, at
Chanel couture this year.INTERVIEW