Actor Julianne Moore can be herself again, having fulfilled her duties as a red-carpet star in a glamorous feathered Christian Lacroix gown at the premiere of her film, Blindness, which opened this year’s Cannes Film Festival.
She’s undimmed by the night’s festivities and her earlier transatlantic flight, and it’s proving difficult to get the lively, attentive actor into interview mode. She spends the first minute of our morning meeting admiring and quizzing me about my jacket.
The venue, Hotel Martinez in Cannes, might offer five-star grandeur, but so naturally personable is Moore that an interview with her is as casual as a neighbourly chat over the garden fence.
Talk soon turns from jackets to US presidential candidate, Democrat Barack Obama. “I really think he can effect change, I honestly do,” says Moore. “I’m still recovering from the surprise and disappointment of when [George W.] Bush was elected for a second term, but at least that will be over soon.”
A Board of Advocates member of the pro-choice Planned Parenthood Federation of America, Moore admits the thought of Republican John McCain getting into office fills her with dread.
“I’m worried about the McCain effect,” she says, her perkiness temporarily clouding over. “He’s very, very conservative. He’s anti-choice, anti-abortion, and wants to keep us in Iraq for the next 100 years. I’m not a fan.”
When it comes to political and social issues, Moore favours direct action over headline-grabbing posturing. She picketed on behalf of the Hollywood writers in the first week of the Writers’ Strike last November.
This year saw the launch of her Valentine’s Day card initiative to support Save the Children.
Not one to get caught up in the glitz of Hollywood, Moore is renowned for turning down Botox. “I don’t know why women do Botox. It doesn’t make them look younger; it just makes them look like they’ve had work done. You’re not going to look the same as you did at 25. What are you going to do about it?”
Though she prefers to stay relatively low-key, Moore isn’t against other people intentionally utilising their fame, however, she is somewhat uncomfortable with the ever-growing, frivolous cult of celebrity.
“In this day and age, there’s this ridiculous fascination with wealth and celebrity,” she sighs.
“It has got out of proportion. It’s very upsetting to me what’s happening these days, because...you see these young rich people growing up with no boundaries and seeking this incredible stimulation that they’re not getting [from] interacting with the world.”
Society gone wrong is very much the beating heart of Moore’s latest film, Blindness, by Brazilian director Fernando Meirelles. The film is an adaptation of Nobel Prize-winning author José Saramago’s chilling indictment of the disintegration of values in modern society.
Moore plays the wife of a doctor (Mark Ruffalo) who fakes blindness to be by her husband’s side when he is quarantined by reactionary authorities trying to contain an epidemic of sudden blindness in their city.
The virtue of her possessing sight soon becomes questionable as she falls victim to the blind imprisoned community that is consumed by the prevalent ills of human nature.
Moore experienced first-hand a theme in the film – that is, how people make judgments based purely on sight – when she was confronted by an elderly neighbour on returning home after having her striking red hair dyed blonde for the role.
“She stared at me in disgust and said, ‘Why? What did you do to yourself?’” Moore recalls. “It was like she thought I was having a midlife crisis or something!”
As her character in Blindness experiences a harrowing range of emotions, the part could be deemed a typical Moore role – the type that other actors might fear to tread.
Widely regarded as one of the best actors not to have been awarded an Oscar, despite four nominations, Moore has tended to play roles that have been too “raw” for the Academy.
The actor has built her reputation on playing characters experiencing psychological meltdown as a result of psychosis (Safe, 1995), drug use (Boogie Nights, 1997), suicidal tendencies (Magnolia, 1999, and The Hours, 2002) or incest (Savage Grace, 2007).
However, if you’re looking for any demons in Moore’s personal life that would cause her to gravitate towards such roles, you’re at a loss to find them.
FAMILY LIFE
Moore defies the notion of a celebrity actor holed up in the Hollywood Hills, consumed by their own fame and fabulousness. “Generally, when you see an actress portrayed in a film or any kind of entertainment, they’re either very glamorous or temperamental, sometimes even tyrannical. If they’re a parent, they’re neglectful.
They’re not ordinary,” Moore says. “I’m a woman who lives in New York, has two children, is married and happens to have a job as an actor, which is the reality of a lot of people I know.”
Moore has been married for five years to writer-director Bart Freundlich. The couple met on the set of The Myth of Fingerprints (1997), which sparked their affair. “It was an affair, that’s right!” laughs Moore, before pondering aloud, “If you get married, do you still call it an affair?”
The couple has two children, Caleb, 10, and Liv, 6. When asked about her expectations of motherhood, Moore says, “When you’re pregnant you think you have an idea of how they’ll be. We define so much by how we see and what we think we’re seeing, but then they hold up your child to you for the first time and it’s like, ‘Whoa, who are you?’ You know at that moment they’re entirely separate from you and you have to learn who they are.
“I thought my son was going to have dark hair and eyes like his dad, and they held up this really skinny, red-haired boy with blue eyes. When my daughter was born, she was enormous and covered with black hair [which later grew red]. When they held her up, again, I was like, ‘Whose baby is that?’”
Last year Moore welcomed a fourth redhead to the family: Freckleface Strawberry, the eponymous character of the children’s book she released last year. Based on Moore’s own childhood experience of overcoming her insecurity about her red hair and freckles, the book has a big heart, not to mention a healthy dose of Moore’s humour.
Moore has enjoyed moonlighting as an author. “It’s been great,” she beams. “The book did really well and I have a contract to do another one, Freckleface and the Ball, which is more inspired by my daughter.
She has a lot more spirit than I did as a kid.” So will there be further instalments of this budding series? “I hope it’s a franchise,” smiles Moore. The new Harry Potter? “I wish...I might need to put some magic in it!”
Moore herself experienced the proverbial fairytale transformation from “ugly duckling” to swan when, aged 15, she swapped her glasses for contact lenses. Suddenly she was “considered pretty” and asked to be the lead in school plays. Soon the bookish pupil felt her desire to be a doctor start to fade.
“My parents really wanted me to be a doctor and they were very excited about that,” says Moore of her psychiatrist mother and military judge father, “so acting kind of threw a wrench in the plans. But I do think my mother and father, given what they do – my mother working with human behaviour and my father’s job causing us to move a lot – did clearly influence me to act in the end.”
Because of her father’s work, Moore lived in more than 20 places – including Alaska and Germany – and went to nine schools. When she was 18 she made the tough decision to leave the family nest in Germany and fly back to the US to attend college.
“I think a lot of people who have itinerant childhoods end up being actors because of that sense of having to adapt everywhere you go, and you pick up on different behaviours,” she says.
Moore planted her roots firmly in New York 25 years ago. She admits it was only after coming out of a nine-year marriage in her early 30s (reports of a two-year marriage in her 20s are dismissed as a myth) that she finally reconciled the life she really wanted. Her big break in acting came shortly after her divorce, in the late Robert Altman’s Short Cuts (1993).
SOLID FOUNDATION
Moore considers embracing her West Village neighbourhood, where she lives with her family in a town house, a conscious effort to provide her children with the stable upbringing she never had.
“I’m lucky with my job,” she reflects. “My husband and I always say we’re lucky because we’re both extremely flexible with what we do. I wrapped Blindness at the end of September and I didn’t go back to work until March. Not bad, huh?”
Surely it can’t all be attributed to good fortune, though? “No, I think you have to work at it,” Moore responds, conscious of her blasé tone. “You have to want it, invest in it and spend time being with your family. It’s not something that just happens.”
Moore tries to limit her films to those shot in New York or during the summer holidays so her children can join her on set. “On [the set of] Blindness the kids loved it,” Moore smiles. “We were in Toronto, we had a pool in the backyard and there are a lot of amusement parks there. They came to work every day and played soccer with the children of the director and other actors.”
Moore says her children initially thought, “Mummy works in a trailer,” but as their school friends began to tell them they’d seen their mum on the cover of a magazine or on TV, she had to explain there was more to it than that: “I told them that their friends had seen me because sometimes I have to talk about my work after it’s done.”
Moore says her children have a healthy attitude to her work. “They don’t care,” she laughs. “That’s what’s normal. In a normal life your family is [at] the centre...My daughter has her ballet class, my son has his basketball, my husband is writing and playing golf, and I act and like to decorate the house.”
However, as soon as Moore’s children are grown, they’ll realise, like the rest of us, that there’s more to their mother than meets the eye.
