Tatler July 2019 tatler.comSaturday morning in Manhattan’s West
Village and Julianne Moore is having
brunch in her local bistro, an elegant,
buzzy spot around the corner from the
brownstone she shares with her husband,
the director Bart Freundlich, and their
two children, Liv, 17, and Caleb, 21 (when
he’s not away at college, anyway). She’s
enjoying herself, but she’s baffled – baffled
by the way the Breton-striped waiters swoosh
down like ravening crows, urgently trying to whisk one
person’s dish away before the other person has finished.
‘Has there been a shift, culturally?’ Moore asks, as she
shoos them away. ‘I waitressed for years in New York, and
it used to be that you didn’t touch anyone’s plate until everyone
had finished. Now’, she says, wrapping her arms mock-
protectively around the crockery, ‘you have to guard your
food. It drives me crazy.’
She must herself have driven diners crazy as a young
waitress, because the first thing you notice about her are
her cheekbones and her Pre-Raphaelite beauty. While she’s
never been an actress who’s led with her looks alone – she
dazzled as a drug-addicted porn star in Boogie Nights and
won the Oscar for Best Actress in 2015 for her devastating
performance in the intense Still Alice – she’s drawn designers
to her like moths to a flame, walking for Chanel, wearing
Raf Simons for Calvin Klein to the Met Gala and Tom Ford
on the red carpet.
And it was with Karl Lagerfeld that she first dived deep
into the world of high fashion. She first met him after she
wore Chanel to the Academy Awards in 1998, the year she
was nominated for Boogie Nights. ‘I had lunch at his house,’
the 58-year-old recalls, a nostalgic smile on her lips. ‘He
was so charming and funny and at the end of lunch he
said, “See? That was fun and we didn’t once talk about
dresses.” He really prided himself on being able to talk
about everything – he was so well read, so interested in
everything that’s going on in the world.’ That, she says, is
the unassailably good side of the fashion and the film worlds’
mutual red-carpet embrace: ‘You meet all these wonderful
artists and artisans – it’s an art form and it’s really a privilege
to be that close to the people who do it.’
She pauses and sighs. ‘Losing Karl was a shock to every-
body, because he was one of those people who we all
believed would live forever. He was so vital, so present, he
did everything himself. Whenever you went to the atelier
he was right there, working.’ Tom Ford, who directed herin A Single Man, is just as all-involved, she says. ‘On a film
set, he’ll do your hair, he’ll fix all the pillows. He’s very
specific – things don’t get by him. He sees everything.’
Including, presumably, her freckles, which she’s spoken of
having loathed ‘between the ages of seven and 49.’ She
laughs. ‘I still don’t like them,’ she adds – and then whips out
her phone to show me images of her famous, naked Bulgari
campaign, in which her skin is pure, freckle-free alabaster.
‘They airbrushed them out!’ she says, without a hint of concern.
As for the real things, ‘I’d prefer not to have them, but I do
have them and so, so what? It’s okay to have something you
don’t love. It’s really all right.’
She’s just as relaxed, and just as accepting, in her latest
cinematic incarnation as the title role in Gloria Bell, an
intimate look at the life of a single, free-spirited fiftysome-
thing woman. ‘It’ll make you laugh really hard and it’ll
make you very emotional, but in a way that feels life-
affirming,’ she enthuses, a living advertisement for joie de
vivre. She’s spot on: Gloria is divorced for over a decade,
with two grown-up children and a less-than-scintillating
job, but refuses to spend her evenings alone, instead heading
out to dance clubs. She embarks on a romance with a man
she meets at one venue, but, when that falls apart, has a
one-night stand with a stranger while on a trip to Las
Vegas, where she wakes up by a swimming pool, minus
one shoe, her wallet, keys and all her ID. Moore laughs,
‘Someone in their thirties who saw it told me, “I didn’t
realise that I could be just as f**ked up in my fifties as I am
in my thirties!”’ But, says Moore firmly, Gloria is not a
tragic, lonely figure: ‘She’s fine. She goes to that club because
she wants to dance – that’s why she’s there. She’s open to a
relationship, but she’s also comfortable sleeping with a guy
and having it be nothing.’
Though Moore’s own children are a good decade behind
Gloria’s, her daughter will be off to college in another year,
and her son will have graduated – the nest will be officially
empty. ‘It’s complicated, you know?’ she says. ‘I feel so happy
for both of my kids – they’re in this really exciting time of
their lives. But there are a lot of complicated feelings of loss.’
Still, she always knew that she wanted to have children. ‘Oh
my God, yes. I wish I’d had more,’ she cries. How many?
‘Four,’ she answers immediately. When she and Freundlich
began their family, just a year into their relationship, she was
37, and he was 28. Did she ever worry that it wouldn’t
happen? ‘I knew that I’d do it whether I was married or not,
and if I didn’t have a child biologically then I would adopt,’
she says. ‘It was always something I was going to do.’ ]‘We won’t do to men what they’ve done towomen. Don’t be afraid to give us the power’07-19COVERSTORY.indd 58 02/05/2019 16:53
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