Age is just a number for Julianne Moore
Actress plays 50-something divorcee searching for love in “Gloria Bell”
NEW YORK – Julianne Moore wants to change the way people talk about aging. ❚ “It’s always so diminishing, like, ‘Oh, no! What are you going to do?’ when it’s (actually) a great privilege to age,” says Moore, 58, kicking off her shoes as she settles onto a plush hotel couch.
Earlier that morning, she saw a “horribly poignant” clip of TV star Luke Perry, who died Monday from a stroke at 52.
“He was talking about playing a dad now (on CW’s “Riverdale”) and how he hopes someday he’ll play the grandfather,” she says. “The heartbreaking thing is, he died way too young, unexpectedly. So I guess I’m more interested in talking about what a life is, where you can go, and how you change and grow.”
The vivacious title character she plays in “Gloria Bell” does both. The film (in theaters Friday in New York and Los Angeles, nationwide March 22) is a shot-for-shot remake of Sebastian Lelio’s 2013 Chilean drama “Gloria,” which
chronicles the everyday life of a fiftysomething divorcee searching for love at L.A. dance clubs and looking after her adult children and new grandson. She begins a passionate courtship with the also-divorced Arnold (John Turturro), whose unscrupulous behavior briefly sends her on a downward spiral of reckless partying and hookups, and then back on the path to self-discovery.
Moore, who is also an executive producer, was drawn to Lelio’s nuanced portrayal of a middle-aged woman – having earned Oscar nominations playing similarly complicated characters in 2002’s “Far From Heaven” and “The
Hours,” and 2014’s “Still Alice,” for which she won best actress.
“When you see movies telling stories about characters who are not always the center of a traditional Hollywood narrative, they’re so arresting and exciting,” Moore says. “You’re seeing people that maybe you know in your ordinary life.”
But even with all its relatable human struggles, “Gloria Bell” still forced Moore to step outside her comfort zone. The actress appears nude in a handful of scenes, some of them sexual, which hasn’t gotten any easier since she first disrobed in 1993’s “Body of Evidence.”
“Somebody asked me, ‘How do you become comfortable?’ And I’m like: ‘You don’t. Nobody’s comfortable,’ ” she says. But “we were very sparing and very specific about it, just because we wanted to lend it a level of reality. If suddenly somebody’s sitting there all covered up at home, you’re sending a signal to my brain that this isn’t true and you’re taking (viewers) out of the story.”
She also was asked to shoot a paintball gun during an empowering scene of demented revenge (“It’s way easier than I thought it was going to be”) and dance with abandon to disco hits by Anita Ward and Earth, Wind & Fire (“It’s terrifying, because I’m not a natural dancer”). Fortunately, Turturro is an expert salsa dancer and was able to teach her a few moves.
“She was nervous, so I tried to work with her, which was also part of the (characters’) relationship a little bit,” Turturro says. “But someone like Julianne can allow herself to be open and vulnerable, and that’s fun.”
Like Gloria, Moore is always ready to dive headfirst into new experiences. She hopes to one day fulfill her dream of building a house and doing the interior design from top to bottom, and take an extended vacation to Asia with her husband, director Bart Freundlich, and kids Caleb, 21, and Liv, 16.
But she’ll have to put those plans on hold for now as she prepares to light up the screen again playing yet another woman named Gloria: feminist icon Gloria Steinem in “The Glorias: A Life on the Road,” which is shooting now in Savannah, Georgia.
“It’s like, how many characters are actually named Gloria? It’s pretty crazy,” Moore laughs. “For one film I got to learn how to dance, and the other I got to learn all about Gloria Steinem, so it’s all good.”