Freeheld puts the focus on women
“I couldn’t figure out who Laurel was,” said Moore. “I couldn’t quite put my finger on Laurel. I was really trying to find her.” When Andree showed her photos of Hester with long, Farrah Fawcett-styled blond hair before her chemotherapy, something clicked.
“I thought, ‘Oh my gosh, her hair!’ ” said Moore. Andree told Moore that Hester had worn her hair like that since she was a teenager and she was very proud of it.
That helped Moore film a poignant scene in Freeheld, where Andree holds Hester in her arms and uses clippers to tenderly remove the final, wispy remnants of the painfully frail woman’s hair. It’s juxtaposed against a noisy demonstration by Hester’s supporters outside a political office.
“How intimate the scene is, how much care Stacie takes with Laurel and how much love you feel between them,” Moore marvelled of the moment. Putting it with scenes of the civil rights fight “is when the person- al becomes political.”
Moore said the time is right for a drama like Freeheld because “women haven’t had a movie like this.” “The gay male community had Philadelphia, but female couples have not had this movie.” (Ron Nyswaner, who won an Oscar for the1993 Tom Hanks drama about a lawyer fighting wrongful dismissal after being diagnosed with AIDS, is also the screenwriter on Freeheld.)
Moore’s hope for Freeheld is that it finds its place in the multiplex with all the other fall releases when it opens Oct. 9, that “people would go and watch it as entertainment and say, ‘Oh my goodness, this is how we all feel about each other and how we all feel about our loved ones.’ ”
“I couldn’t quite put my finger on Laurel. I was really trying to find her.”
JULIANNE MOORE ON PLAYING LAUREL HESTER IN FREEHELD