COVER STORY

Julianne Moore on the beauty and drama of portraying an ordinary life

Ocharactersscar winner Julianne Moore is known for her unique beauty, her intelligence and her uncanny ability to disappear into roles. She can make the most complicated sympathetic to audiences, whether she’s playing a matriarchal porn star or a ruthless dictator in a dystopian future. She’s become Hollywood’s go-to gold star ‘adulteress’: from her breakout performance in 1993’s Short Cuts as the tequila-drinking artist Marian Wyman and breaking her vows with Ralph Fiennes in The End of the Affair to the ’50s housewife who falls for her African-American gardener in Far from Heaven, Julianne has made a career out of being unfaithful on screen. She also steals a kiss from Toni Collette in The Hours, has an affair with Alec Baldwin on 30 Rock, enjoys a romp with Amanda Seyfried in Chloe and cheats in The Kids are All Right, Magnolia and Crazy, Stupid, Love.

But at the end of the day, says Julianne, the ‘adulteress’ label is incidental. ‘Some people say, “You play happy people,” and I’m like, “No.” Or, “You play people who have affairs,” and I’m like, “No.” Or, “You play lesbians,” and I’m like, “No!” I’ve made 50-something movies, so there’s a lot of different people. I like really human stories.’ Julianne’s father, Peter, was a US paratrooper and her Scottish-born mother, Anne, worked as a social worker.

“Violent and original” means “free” to me – how free you can be in your work. Julianne Moore at this year’s Cannes Film Festival in France.

Because of her father’s career, they never stayed in one spot for too long. This meant that Julianne had moved a total of 23 times and enrolled at nine schools before she turned 18. ‘It’s not something I’d recommend but it made me who I am,’ she says. ‘It gave me adaptability, a sense of universality.’

Hard as it is to imagine, she wasn’t always as poised and graceful she is now. ‘In grade school

I was a complete geek,’ she says with a laugh. ‘You know, there’s always the kid who’s too short, the one who wears glasses, who’s not athletic. Well, I was all three.’ She was also teased about her freckles; at the age of seven she was given the nickname Freckleface Strawberry (more about that later).

Julianne found comfort in books (‘I was always the first person at the library checking out as many books as I could’) and this sparked her love for storytelling. But it was only when her family settled in Germany that her love of acting really took shape.

‘When I started doing acting at school it seemed like I was reading aloud. You feel like you are in the story.’

With the support of her high school theatre teacher, Julianne told her parents she was going to Boston to study acting after graduation. Her mom, not overly thrilled with her choice, asked her why she was wasting her brain. In the end, they gave her their blessing and off she went. At 25, Julianne landed her big break when she was cast in the hit soap As the World Turns. She played Frannie Hughes – and her evil half-sister Sabrina. Julianne recalls a particular favourite line from her time on the soap: ‘Now that I know Kevin [her boyfriend in the show] is out of jail, I think I’ll take a nap.’ The role earned her a Daytime Emmy Award.

By 30, she made her big-screen debut in the comedy horror anthology Tales from the Darkside, before moving on to major projects like The Hand That Rocks the Cradle, The Fugitive (which caught the eye of Steven Spielberg, who would later cast her in The Lost World: Jurassic Park) and Nine Months. From 1996 to 2006, Julianne appeared in an average of two movies a year.

Today, after almost three decades in the industry, she’s easily one of the most sought-after actors in Hollywood, with four Oscar nominations and one win under her belt. Despite her apparent affinity for playing an adulteress, however, Julianne never finds herself pigeonholed: she’s done both comedy (who can forget her deadpan performance in The Big Lebowski or her stint as Nancy Donovan on 30 Rock – that Boston accent!) and drama: in Boogie Nights, Magnolia or Still Alice (the role that finally won her an Oscar). ‘What’s important to me is always the script. There has to be something about the story that grabs me, otherwise, why waste even one day on it?’

Not that it’s always been plain sailing. On an episode of Watch What Happens Live, Julianne spilled on what had really happened on the set of Can You Ever Forgive Me?, confessing that she was booted off the project while Nicole Holofcener was still at the helm of the Lee Israel biopic. ‘I think she didn’t like what I was doing,’ Julianne explained. ‘I think her idea of where the character was, was different from my idea of where the character was, and so she fired me.’ Shortly after her axing, production fell apart and the movie was eventually passed on to Marielle Heller and Melissa McCarthy (who went on to be nominated for an Oscar for her performance). Julianne added that she hadn’t seen the film, and while she has the utmost respect for Melissa, the whole experience still hurt.

When she’s not on location, Julianne lives in New York with her husband, director Bart

Freundlich. They met on Bart’s 1997 film The Myth of Fingerprints, and got married in 2003, after having had their kids. ‘The only reason I got married was for my children,’ she admits. (Bart and Julianne have two children: Caleb, who is 21, and Liv, who is 17.) ‘I had a therapist who said marriage is really a container for a family and that made sense to me.’

Julianne is also the author of the children’s book series Freckleface Strawberry, inspired by her own feelings of otherness while growing up. She remembers her son, who was seven at the time, telling her that he didn’t like his ears or his teeth. Even though she thought he was perfect, she recalled how she had felt about her own freckles when she was his age.

‘When you have something that makes you stand out when you’re young it makes you feel uncomfortable; that’s what I wanted to write the book about,’ she explains. ‘I wanted to show that we all feel that way when we’re young.’

This year Julianne is appearing in a string of female-led films: Gloria Bell, After the Wedding and the crime mystery The Woman in the Window. Her performance in Gloria Bell, which premiered in South Africa on 17 May, garnered rave reviews. Julianne plays the title role of Gloria, a divorcee with two grown children who’s trying to live her best life.

‘Gloria Bell was so interesting to me because it’s about a woman reimagining her whole life, and she happens to be in her fifties,’ she says. ‘I want to see a person of this gender, in this age group, as a central character in her own story, as we all are.’ In Gloria the actress found someone real who she could really relate to. ‘I’m very good at kind of separating my work from my life. But there are characters that I care more about than others. There are some characters I’m really happy to say goodbye to.’ Not Gloria. ‘I have so much affection for her,’ she says. ‘I think she’s a role model.’ What spoke to her most was Gloria’s quiet resilience.

‘People think that to be brave, you have to be tough,’ Julianne says. ‘Tough means that you can kind of shield yourself from things that are happening; resilience is about allowing things to penetrate your being – to experience them, to be hurt by them, to react to them, but then moving on anyway and moving on with real positivity.’

After a stunning worldwide premiere at the Sundance Film Festival at the start of the year,

After the Wedding is heading to cinemas in August. Julianne stars alongside Michelle Williams, who plays the manager of a Calcutta orphanage who comes to New York to meet her benefactor. Then, releasing in October and based on The New York Times bestseller, The Woman in the Window is about an agoraphobic woman who begins spying on her neighbours, only to witness a disturbing act of violence.

And 2020 won’t see Julianne taking a break either; she has two big projects on the horizon. She’ll star as Gloria Steinem in the upcoming biographic film based on the journalist’s memoir, A Life on the Road. Directed by Julie Taymor, The Glorias: A Life on the Road sees Julianne joined by young actress Lulu Wilson (of The Haunting of Hill House and Sharp Objects fame) and Alicia Vikander to play the feminist icon through the years.

‘Bette Midler plays Bella Abzug, Janelle Monáe plays Dorothy Pitman Hughes and Lorraine Toussaint plays Flo Kennedy,’ Julianne gushes. ‘It’s an amazing group of people and everyone is there because we want to tell the story of Gloria and the women’s movement.’

Like so many other A-listers, Julianne also has her sights set on a high-profile TV role; she will return to the small screen in Apple’s upcoming limited series Lisey’s Story, based on Stephen King’s horrorromance novel of the same name. Lisey’s Story will be produced by JJ Abrams and all eight episodes are written by King himself. The story follows the widow of a famous novelist two years after the death of her husband. As she starts clearing out his study, she has to face certain realities about him that she’d repressed.

Although Julianne thinks it’s important to advocate for female-led films, she finds it frustrating. ‘Why do we have to be so f**king gendered all the time? I don’t think there’s a female filmmaker who wants to be called a “female filmmaker”. You just want to be a filmmaker. Why do we have to keep commenting on it and how unusual it is? I’m like, “Let’s just do it!”’

Julianne’s mantra is a quote from French novelist Gustave Flaubert: ‘Be regular and orderly in your life, so that you may be violent and original in your work’. ‘“Violent and original”means “free” to me – how free you can be in your work. In my work, I want it to seem like life is happening to me on camera.’

‘I don’t think there’s a female filmmaker who wants to be called a “female filmmaker”.’