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Neubauer Artists LLC
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It’s a hot afternoon in Montauk, and guests at a rustic-chic hotel right on the beach are strolling around an outdoor cafe, ordering fresh, brightly colored seasonal vegetables and debating which is better value—a glass or a bottle. One boy, intently watching the kind and patient cocktail master make him a mocktail, smiles broadly when he hands him a fresh green sprig of mint to munch on while he waits.
Julianne Moore comes down the sandy path to join me in this idyllic summer scene. She wears a navy linen shirt and dark denim shorts, her hair is tied in a low bun, with a large gold chain-necklace on her collarbones and a thin gold bracelet on her wrist. Her buckle swings like a pendulum as she extends her arms to greet me, apologizes for being a few minutes late due to parking, and greets the cafe manager and staff, who know her very well.
The afternoon we spend at the cafe, sitting under a large orange umbrella, is actually the first time I’ve met Moore, but before we officially begin the interview, I tell her that our paths have crossed before. Twenty years ago, I worked as a cashier at a convenience store in Yorkville, a neighborhood in Toronto that once served most of the Toronto International Film Festival . Film stars and directors were regular buyers of groceries. (We also moved the gossip magazines to the back of the press rack during those weeks, to avoid confronting our celebrity clients with pictures of them looking just like us). One afternoon, as I was rushing back from break, I almost bumped into a girl in the fruit and vegetable section. “I’m so sorry,” I said, bending over to check I hadn’t hit her in the face with my knee. I looked up to apologize to her mother and saw it was Julianne Moore. “Oh, she’s fine,” Moore replied. “Don’t worry.” But of course I was worried, and I remember that event for the last two decades. Every encounter with celebrities seems like a collision, but this one was too close to a real accident . It is one of my most indelible memories from my time working in the service sector, although of course Moore doesn’t remember it. She, however, confirms that her daughter was probably covered in pictures at that age.
Over the past four decades, Moore, now sixty-five, has become a unique phenomenon – an actress and movie star that almost everyone can easily and instantly recognize, with a face that, once seen, redefines the standards of beauty. I’m aware of watching Julianne Moore act and still believing I’m seeing Carol White ( Safe ), Amber Waves ( Boogie Nights ), Maud Lebowski ( The Big Lebowski ), Laura Brown ( The Hours ) or even President Alma Coyne ( The Hunger Games: Mockingjay ). Each of her roles etched in my memory the ways in which it is possible to understand a woman you will never meet in person.
In December, Moore stars in The Debut , Jesse Eisenberg’s third feature as writer-director. It is the second film he made with Moore and the first that can, technically, be classified as a musical, within the film itself is a theater piece for which Eisenberg also wrote the music and lyrics. Set in the 1990s, the film follows Mona Friedman (Moore), a suburban New Jersey housewife who decides to audition for a local theater production about the lovable tenants of a dilapidated apartment building. Her husband (Patrick Fabian) mostly doesn’t care about her, and neither do her children, except when it comes to the chores he does. Mona is looking for freedom, but maybe she’s just trading one limitation for another, the rest of the cast are dedicated to their craft and followers of Jerry, the grandiose director played by Paul Giamatti. The collective belief in his genius and need for his approval seems a little too believable for Mona. She becomes carried away by their ideas about art, authenticity, and acting, and mesmerized by the possibility that she even has a place in it all. But in trying to break through Mona’s shyness in order to pull off real acting, Jerry creates an artistic monster—someone who is willing to go too far and act too callously in the pursuit of excellence.
The Debut is an insightful film about a small scene, convinced of its own greatness, but made with the heart of people who intimately understand those impulses. “There’s a scene where all the actors are sitting outside, having lunch, and it’s kind of a happy, collegial atmosphere, but at the same time it’s incredibly awkward because they’re not cool at all,” says Moore. “We couldn’t stop laughing. We all used to be that lunch table in elementary school; we’d go to the mall in costume after the school play.”
In fact, it is Moore’s deftness in understanding a woman on the edge that keeps The Debut from becoming bitter. Even as Mona falls into greater delusions, and her behavior goes from shy to unstable and bizarre, Moore’s performance is as someone approaching a precipice in her life, where she must choose to be more herself, no matter what it takes. It’s an act where physical strength and mental sharpness are in perfect balance.. “Julianne has been my favorite actress since I started watching adult movies,” Jesse Eisenberg tells me. “I feel a great debt to her, as if I should carry her on my bed through the desert to an oasis so she can drink water. I am fascinated by her talent.”
In 2002, Moore starred in Todd Haynes’ Far from Heaven and Stephen Daldry’s The Hours , two very different productions in which she played middle-class housewives longing to abandon family duties and civic aspirations in search of something as yet unknown. At the time, critics noted the similarities, suggesting that Moore only played housewives, as if the coincidence in her roles was intentional or redundant—as if the character of one housewife was enough to understand what kind of woman she might be.
“Behaviour is not the same
as character. You can change
the way you speak, move
and dress,
but that doesn’t mean you are you, your
essence remains intact”
Themes of marriage and family life were also at the center of her earlier notable roles in Robert Altman’s Short Cuts (1993) and Todd Haynes’ Safe (1995). The movie The Debut adds another housewife to that list. But none of the housewives Moore has played are the same. Nor are the mothers, doctors, professors, artists or actresses she portrayed the same. She just managed to make us believe that we were seeing these characters for who they were – extraordinary and normal, lovely and strange, unique and imperfect in all the ways that only that particular person could be. Moore observed one truth about the films she made, which the audience loves and remembers the most, and that is the ones she made for herself. “They talk about the human condition, about what we all struggle with all the time,” she says. “I often find, in film or television, that there always has to be a murder in order for there to be an emotional stake. I think most of us have really big roles in our lives that don’t involve murder.” Whether it’s a mother who can’t take care of her child, a wife who can’t trust her husband, or a lover who can’t stay faithful, she is above something as trivial as bad or good. Her characters go through ordinary lives, which is devastating enough.
When Moore was a fifth grader living in Juneau, Alaska, there was one library and one movie theater. The town was small enough that even when she was a child, her parents let her ride the bus by herself, so she could go whenever she wanted. She read constantly, and every Saturday there was a new movie in the repertoire. “I watched The Aristocats there ,” she recalls, “and Minnie and Moskowitz .” It’s pretty advanced film reading for an eleven-year-old girl, though we agree that many children would benefit from a more comprehensive education on the work of John Cassavetes and Gene Rowlands.
Moore’s father was a career military officer, and his job took the family all over the world, from Fort Bragg, North Carolina, where Julianne was born, to Alaska and Frankfurt, Germany, where she graduated from high school, with stops in Texas, Nebraska and places in between. When Moore was a child, her mother went back to school and became a psychiatric social worker.
Others pointed to Moore’s childhood to explain her knack for becoming someone new on command. She carries with her the feeling of being both familiar and foreign at the same time, regardless of where she appears. Moore understands that interpretation and agrees with it to a certain extent. “I don’t have a different experience, so I don’t know if I would be different, but I know it’s not unusual for actors to have a kind of nomadic upbringing,” she says. “It’s obviously something that plays into that idea of how to fit in. Behavior is not the same as character. You can change the way you talk, the way you move, the way you dress, but that doesn’t mean that’s who you are, the essence of you remains intact.”
Moore’s mother was a second-wave feminist. “I don’t know if she would describe herself that way,” he notes, “but she belonged to that era, and I was very much brought up with those ideas.” It was a period when many young women were raised to think about their lives and opportunities outside the family home, to get an education and build a career. “The romantic life,” as Moore remembers her early adoption of the idea, was something that was just going to happen .”
But after marrying her first husband in her mid-twenties and divorcing in her thirties, she realized that her personal life, just like her professional life, requires conscious effort. Moore has been in a relationship with director Bart Freundlich since 1996. They married in 2003 and raised two children in New York, Caleb, 28, and Liv, now twenty-four. When Moore’s not working, she describes herself as someone who’s really, really happy with routines , developing rituals that aren’t strict but, in her opinion, are best lived out the way she sets them up. He is a superstitious person; rituals provide her with a good basis for magical thinking, especially when it comes to luck. “It’s become a big joke in my family that my husband and I are like, Well, that sweater isn’t bringing us happiness . I realize it’s not real, but I was definitely a lot more superstitious when I was younger, because when you’re young, a lot depends on your life. Will I get the job? Will they call me back? And then you’re like, I don’t know, throw away the tarot cards .”
The younger Julianne, the one who tried to predict or predetermine the future, which she could not yet know, cared more about talismans, but a life of constant moving had broken that specific spell that objects can have or cast on us. For her now, the key thing is pure happiness. She defines happiness as a transparent dream , that is, a blessing , she says. “Gift. Beautiful day. Everything went well, caught all the green lights, got the last of the fried zucchini sticks.”
What connects everything she does, she believes, is beauty. “Don’t we all like pretty things?” he asks me, not entirely rhetorically. “I want things to be beautiful. I always thought I was a completely verbal person, and as I’ve gotten older, I’ve realized that I’m actually a very visual type.” She loves interior design and helping people decorate, including her son, who is engaged and getting married this fall. She sends him and his partner links to items she thinks would fit in their space, and talks to them about lighting in the rooms.
Julienne’s co-star from The Debut , Paul Giamatti, describes her work as wonderful and strange . It’s such a unique body of acting that it would be trite to compare it to anyone else’s, but when I ask Moore which of her contemporaries she considers an inspiration, she cites Isabelle Huppert.
Neither Moore nor Huppert remember how they met, but Isabelle remembers the moment that she says marks the beginning of their friendship. After several meetings at various festivals and business events, Huppert played in a play in New York, and Moore came to see it, all by herself. “I thought it was wonderful, because I’m not sure I would have dared to go to the theater by myself. It seemed nice and unexpected,” says Huppert. “I think we have a similar approach. We are able to navigate between the more commercial films and the more intimate, auteur ones,” she explains. “Also, we might as well be part of a gang of redheads. Obviously we could play sisters.”
Huppert points to the dexterity and humanity of Moore’s performance in David Cronenberg’s dark satire Maps to the Stars (2014), where she plays an actress whose fame fades and becomes obsessed with getting her career back on track, as one example of her sheer acting range. “It can go from the most intimate and reasonable to the most elaborate and exaggerated,” says Huppert. “As with any great actress, she doesn’t say everything. She knows how to preserve that undefined, unspoken part of herself.”
Giamatti says that this versatility – and her innate compassion – is part of what makes her so fascinating, both to watch and to work with. “She’s very quirky, natural, serious. She can be both expressive and understated, and bizarre and down-to-earth,” he says. “And she’s also such a joy to work with, she’s so funny, witty and just draws you so deeply into the story.” (Giamatti had met her only once before they worked together, completely by accident, while shopping in Montauk; just like in my case, the only time he was in Montauk was marked by the opportunity to meet Julianne Moore).
Next up for Moore is Cry to Heaven , the hotly anticipated new film from Thom Ford, based on Anne Rice’s novel about castrati in 18th-century Venice. “I play a very rich woman and I change about four outfits within two minutes on screen,” she says. Their relationship is long-lasting, based on friendship and mutual respect. For audiences watching their individual work, as well as their collaboration on his directorial debut A Single Man (2009), it’s easy to see that they share the same kind of love for beauty – both in and through acting. “I love spending time with him,” she tells me. “He’s an old friend and he’s so funny.”
Ford remembers meeting Moore in the mid-1990s and being attracted to her almost instantly. “For me, there have always been three levels of friendship,” he says. “The first are the people you would go to lunch with, the second are the people you would have dinner with, and the third is the person you would go on vacation with. We immediately skipped the first two,” he explains. “She is warm and loyal.” On set, their dynamic is similarly simple and easy: “When you hire her, there’s no need for a lot of directing,” he says. “She always gives an absolutely stunning performance.”
“Behavior is not character,” says Moore. I think about this sentence many times after our afternoon together. Our behavior is not our character, but our character is not something that can be seen or studied, we describe our actions and movements with explanations that justify us, or we fixate on our mistakes and near misses through anxiety that reprimands us. But this constant act of extracting meaning from what we have done changes completely depending on whether it is read from the inside or the outside. So I often think that actors possess a certain intelligence or psychological insight that, at their best, makes them able to simultaneously recognize and play out the contradictions between who someone is and what that someone does. No one thinks of himself as the villain in the story. No one thinks he has a bad character. People think they have their reasons.
“I don’t know who someone is until it’s written. It all starts when I feel I know that person while they’re on paper,” Moore tells me as we discuss her process. “You think about what someone is saying, whether they really mean what they’re saying, where they live, the narrative they’ve created around themselves, and what the real story might be.”
A therapist once told Moore that if actors were taken for vital signs after performing an emotional scene, all the physiological symptoms of real emotion would be present – increased heart rate, shortness of breath, cold sweats. “You hypnotize yourself into it,” she explains. “But the beauty of it is that you can be guided by your intellect. It’s really, really stimulating, both intellectually and emotionally, and I love it. It’s not real, but it’s your responsibility.”
In Elizabeth Hardwick’s 1974 essay on Virginia Woolf, there is a passage that I often return to because of the feeling and thought it conveys – while reading Woolf’s The Waves , she “can’t think of anything else to say about it except that it was wonderful. You can only say again and again that it was very good, very beautiful, and that you were happy while you were reading it.”
That’s how I feel when I watch Julianne Moore act. I watched her play so many different women; I even watched her, in The Hours , play a woman reading Virginia Woolf, inscrutable, yet completely lucid. Moore’s roles are feats of emotional agility. She sees a broken heart as a physical injury, and tears as a text for what the scripts leave unsaid – pleasure in all its beauty and consequences.
“When your body cries, it’s a way to rebalance yourself,” says Moore. “You have too many feelings, and that’s part of the release you need to feel better.”
Watching Moore cry has the same effect on me. What could I say to explain why I understand her characters without even knowing why? Maybe it’s just that when I watch her, I think she’s very good, and if her roles aren’t the kind that make me happy, they’re something much better: They make me feel.
Text: Haley Mlotek
Photography: Senta Simond
Styling: Malina Joseph Gilchrist
Hair: Jimmy Paul
Makeup: Romy Soleimani
Manicure: Yuko Tsuchihashi for Linc Original Makers
Set Design: Bailey Rose Brown
Special Thanks to Please Space
