Julianne Moore: ‘I wanted the family experience and that meant making certain career choices’

Julianne Moore, 63, had to perfect a British accent for her latest role. Photo / WireImage

This is how Julianne Moore reassures herself that she is home: an egg-white omelette and a bagful of design magazines with features about the seven most beautiful pagodas around the world.

‘I just got back from Madrid last night and I’m soooo happy to be here,’ she says, arriving for lunch at Café Cluny, not far from her home in Manhattan’s West Village. Snow is expected later, so she is bundled up in a black sweater, corduroy trousers worn over her boots.

On screen, Moore’s freckled beauty can be slightly mask-like – a kind of armour, angular and unreadable in profile – lending an air of fiercely protected mystery to the most seemingly ordinary of women. One thinks of the obsessive housewives she has played for director Todd Haynes, baking cakes and using words like ‘jiminy’ as they wallpaper over the abyss, or her Oscar-winning role in Still Alice as a Manhattan mother with Alzheimer’s.

‘The sphinx next door’, screenwriter Bruce Wagner once called her. In person, Moore – ‘Julie’ to her friends – has something of the Annie Hall-ish energy she first showed in The Kids Are All Right: bright, friendly, slightly scattered, talking at a merry clip.

Moore: 'I still don't like having red hair and freckles particularly, but it doesn't matter.' Photo / AP

‘I always have the same thing,’ she says, perusing the menu as the waiter appears to take her order: egg-white omelette withspinach and cheddar cheese, well done, with mixed greens and a side of zucchini fries. Her black leather handbag is stuffed with American and French editions of Architectural Digest, bought from the magazine store on the corner on the way over from her home, which Moore has filled with Isamu Noguchi lamps, Moroccan carpets and other vintage finds.

‘I love to decorate,’ she says. ‘I love furniture. I say that cleaning is my superpower. I’m just really, really good at it. I always have been, not ashamed of it.’ ‘That’s interesting,’ I say, ‘because in your films, it’s…’ ‘Chaos?’ she suggests, and laughs. ‘Yeah. Absolutely. But that’s the Flaubert quote, isn’t it? “Be regular and orderly in your life, so that you may be violent and original in your work.”’

For years now, Moore has sought to strike an immaculate balance between the two, picking roles for their proximity to New York – Still Alice, Vanya on 42nd Street, Maggie’s Plan, After the Wedding and What Maisie Knew were all filmed within 10 miles of her home – so she could concentrate on raising her family.

Her son Caleb and daughter Liv attended the same school since they were in kindergarten. But both are now fully grown – Caleb is 26 and Liv is 21 – and have left home to pursue careers in music and film, leaving Moore and her husband, filmmaker Bart Freundlich, with an empty nest, but also opening up a whole new world of film projects for Moore. In Madrid she was rehearsing for two weeks with Tilda Swinton and Pedro Almodóvar, for the director’s first English-language feature, The Room Next Door.

Moore with her husband Bart Freundlich and daughter Liv. Photo / FilmMagic

‘When my kids were little or in high school, I just wouldn’t take the part. Everything I did had to be in New York, or I could go away in little bits or in the summertime,’ she says.

‘I really, really valued having a family. I wanted my kids to feel rooted somewhere. I wanted to have the experience of being in a family, and that meant making certain choices about work that would allow me to do that. It’s a very different situation when you can just up and go. But it is still a challenge. You’re like, “Wait, wait, where’s my life?”’

As for many parents facing a suddenly empty nest, the new freedoms can seem a little dizzying. She recently spent four and a half months in London filming her first period drama for TV, Mary & George, in which she is Mary Villiers, an ambitious player in the court of King James I who groomed her son to be a favourite of the King.

In the process, Villiers became one of the most influential figures the English court had ever seen and was later buried in Westminster Abbey. During filming, Moore stayed in a house in Notting Hill very near the restaurant Ottolenghi, ‘so I had plenty of delicious takeout’, and visited her ‘favourite restaurant’ Sumi every week: ‘I love that place.’ Her husband travelled over a few times, as did her sister, Caleb and his girlfriend, ‘so I had lots of visitors’.

Even so, the production was challenging. She’d pulled off an English accent before – for The End of the Affair and An Ideal Husband – but this was her first time in front of a full court of Brits. ‘I was the only American, so it was daunting because everything – culturally, historically – was not my world.

‘In terms of Jacobean history, it was a very short period. There’s not a lot that even English people know, and American people even less. So there would be times when I would say, “Listen, guys, I need to defer to you in terms of behaviours and culture and all of that. It’s not my first language…”

‘I think the hardest part was in January. I got there and it was so wet. I was like, “Oh, no.” It was lonely sometimes because, like I said, you’re away from your life.’

The show was shot in various stately homes – including Knole in Kent, Ham House in Richmond and Hatfield House in Hertfordshire – requiring lots of early morning wake-ups, when London was still dark, to drive to some beautiful cold old property where she would spend two hours in hair and make-up, before costumier Annie Symons and her team would literally construct Moore’s fur-lined gowns and embroidered bodices around her body.

‘She was in a lot, every day, filming in these cold castles and homes,’ says Tony Curran, who plays James I. In one scene, Mary Villiers makes a debut in the King’s court that goes so badly she throws up afterwards. ‘I said, “Are you all right?”’ remembers Curran. ‘”Oh yes, yeah, I’m fine. I’m fine.” And she was buttoned up in this tight bodysuit. I’m like, “You sure you’re all right?” She goes, “Yeah, I can’t breathe, but I’ll be fine.

‘I mean, the women, God bless them, strapped into these bodices. That’s the way it was for the women at the time and that’s the way it was for the actresses. If it was daunting to Julie, it certainly didn’t show. It’s tough to do these shows – to have that glint in your eye, as it were – but she carried the whole thing. She’s a powerhouse.’

‘She led that production so quietly but completely,’ says Nicola Walker, who plays Lady Hatton, Villiers’ nemesis in the series, the two exchanging blood-curdling insults with one another every time they meet. Off-camera, they formed a tight bond. ‘I felt I could do anything with her,’ continues Walker.

‘You could go anywhere and she would go there with you, because all her work is done before she sets foot in front of the camera. She’s gymnastic in the way she moves through a scene. She took my breath away.’

You wonder if Moore’s sense of being an outsider didn’t, in fact, play into the role in some way. After all, Mary Villiers was the consummate arriviste. Born into humble circumstances in 1570, she married Sir George Villiers as a teenager and gave birth to four children. Upon his death, she dispatched her second son, George, to the French court to cultivate him so she could dangle him in front of the homosexual King James. ‘Let us seize what should be f—king ours,’ declares Mary in the show, which is pungently scripted with lashings of salty language, sex, blood and black humour. This is not your grandmother’s period drama, but a dark comedy of power and ambition.

Oscar-winners Natalie Portman, left, and Julianne Moore star in May December. Photo / AP

Called variously a ‘harridan’, ‘a creature’ and ‘barely a woman’, Villiers would have been, in another era, the villain of the piece, in the mould of Lady Macbeth. As Moore plays her, she is a wily survivor, not above a little blackmail, and even poison, to get what she wants. Even the vulnerability she shows that day – throwing up at court – is a clever feint: play-acting the underdog to win sympathy.

For Moore, the scene showed ‘how bold Mary is, how brave and how determined to outwit everyone’, she says. ‘I mean here’s this woman, just in terms of sexual politics, she’s somebody who has no agency, no autonomy, no property, she has nothing and probably not a lot of education either. She has absolutely no options, except through marriage – or through her male children. So it’s like, how do I live? How do I stay afloat? How do I prepare my children? How do I help them into the world?

‘She will do everything that she can to advance her children and herself. Because of her ambition. Because of her intelligence and that ambition, she’s considered ‘barely a woman’. Because if she were a woman, she’d rely solely on her beauty. Also, she’s older, too. Some people are like, it’s unseemly to be that old and doing what she’s doing… I don’t think ambition is a dirty word at all. I think anything worth doing is worth doing well. That’s really all ambition is.’

It’s hard not to hear these words, spoken with such quiet conviction amid the clatter and chatter of Café Cluny – or indeed not to take Moore’s fierce performance in Mary & George – as something of a cri de coeur from an actor who, at 63, still commands a regular flow of juicy roles on screen and off, dazzling the fashion press with Chanel catwalk looks on the red carpet.

‘What’s so remarkable about Julianne Moore is that she’s one of the most lovely and charming people you will ever meet, but that’s not part of the kind of roles that she plays,’ says Todd Haynes, who has directed Moore in five films, including Safe, Far From Heaven and, most recently, May December, opposite Natalie Portman. The film has been Oscar-nominated for its original screenplay, but many feel it has been unjustly overlooked for best film.

‘She’s brilliant because she’s stripped down and it feels like she’s never done before what she’s about to do now,’ says Haynes. ‘She really put herself in places of uncertainty. That’s where she finds herself in these stories – at the most fragile and uncertain moments of life. I think she is drawn to that.’

Julianne Moore at the 29th Critics Choice Awards on January 14, 2024, at the Barker Hangar in Santa Monica, California. Photo / AP

Moore treasures a remark by theatre director André Gregory, who wrote Uncle Vanya on 42nd Street, that ‘she’s Beauty and the Beast’, but is resistant to being put under the microscope herself. She likes to disappear into her roles. Make too close a connection between them, or suggest a personal predilection for a certain type, and you get a flash of steel – ‘But these are different,’ she will say, or, ‘No, no, no. I’m going to stop this because they’re not the same…’ – her smile snapping back into place afterwards. Polite but firm.

Her husband calls it her ‘fiercely protective exterior’, designed to keep her creative spark alight. ‘She’s one of those people for whom the portal to up there is open, so you guard it the same way you would guard your family, by being very careful with your boundaries,’ he has said. ‘Her number one job is to protect that.’

In her childhood, Moore and her brother and sister moved around a lot as her father transitioned from a job as a helicopter pilot to, eventually, judge on the US Court of Appeals for the Armed Forces at the Pentagon. They lived in as many as 20 places, including North Carolina, Nebraska, Alabama, Panama, Texas, New York, Washington and Germany, which meant Moore was always the new kid in class – skinny, redheaded and freckly – who didn’t play outdoors as much as other kids did. Her mother Anne was Scottish, so she got a lot of questions of the ‘Why does your mother talk so funny?’ variety.

In My Mom Is a Foreigner, But Not to Me – one of the children’s books Moore has written, which have sold hundreds of thousands of copies in multiple languages – Moore deals with the embarrassment of a mum who does everything differently (‘She makes me do stuff foreign ways. She says that it’s polite’). In another, Moore’s young, redheaded alter ego, Freckleface Strawberry, tries to make her freckles go away with lemon juice and soap, and covers them with a mask. Moore says she wrote the books for her kids.

‘My son had just turned seven, and his teeth had come in, his big teeth, and that feeling of like, “Oh my gosh, why are my teeth so big?”’ she says. ‘He got a haircut and he didn’t like how his ears looked. I just thought about that and writing a story and thinking about how I didn’t like having red hair, I didn’t like having freckles. I still don’t like having red hair and freckles particularly, but it doesn’t matter. So the lesson isn’t that you change. All of that stuff comes with you, it’s just that it matters less.’

Moore used to study the other kids obsessively – how do they walk, how do they talk, what do they do, what are the rules here? – in order to fit in. She learnt ‘how to read behaviour and to know that it is mutable, behaviour is not who you are. But you’re always very aware of how to signal things. I think that it’s interesting how much we signal in terms of the way we speak or move or dress, all of those things. That’s always part of it.’ Yet every week, no matter where they were, her mother took Moore and her siblings to the library to check out books.

‘She had ambitions she was never able to realise,’ Moore’s brother, Peter Smith, told The New Yorker. ‘She communicated powerfully to both my sisters that in order for them to achieve success, they had to be better than anybody. They couldn’t just be good. They had to be excellent.’

Julianne Moore and Charles Melton in May December.

When Anne Smith died of septicaemia in 2009, at the age of 68, two months before her retirement, Moore and her sister, Valerie Wells, who is now a business executive, took up British citizenship to honour her. ‘It was really for my mother. Because back when she became a [US] citizen when she was 27, you had to renounce your native citizenship, which was really rough for her. She came home crying. You don’t have to do that any more. You can actually hold two passports. So I think when I had the opportunity to do it, it was just amazingly meaningful to have.’

On the set of Mary & George, she discussed her Scottish roots with Tony Curran, who ‘sounds like everybody in my mother’s family. He really does. He’s Glaswegian. My mother was from Greenock, right outside of Glasgow, so everyone sounds like Tony’.

When I ask her if she minds ageing, her answer is as fantastically blunt as her performances. ‘It’s the same for everybody, right? We’re all going to die. There’s the whole beauty industry, that’s one thing, and that’s really about business. But the thing that we all really fear is death, and that’s the worst part.

So when you asked me how I feel, I’m like, “You mean that I’m going to die? That I’m closer to dying than I was before?” Because that’s what it’s about. If I’m lucky, I get to live a long time and I get to do a little more of what I do. I feel like it’s a miracle that I do what I do, and I’m able to support myself doing it. It’s an exploration of all kinds of human behaviour, the good, the bad and the ugly. There are a million things that you get to explore, playing somebody from a time period, from another culture, whose behaviour is outrageous, that you wouldn’t ever dare do in real life.’

During her two weeks in Madrid with Swinton and Almodóvar, they spent most of the weekdays rehearsing, going through the script, doing wardrobe fittings and make-up tests, but weekends were free – and the weather was unusually warm for January. ‘It was lovely to walk around,’ she says. They visited the Reina Sofía and Prado museums to gaze at Goyas and Velázquezes, then Almodóvar arranged a tour of the Maestras show at the Thyssen-Bornemisza, featuring work by female painters, and they all had dinner at a flamenco restaurant. ‘It was the first time I had seen flamenco, and it was astonishing, incredibly unusual and very dramatic. It was very exciting for the performers to have Pedro in the audience, everyone came over to say hello afterwards.’

She will return to Madrid in March to shoot the film. That will be followed by a thriller called Echo Valley with Sydney Sweeney – which was shut down by the actors’ strike – that they need to finish, and then possibly a film with Scottish director Lynne Ramsay. ‘Yeah, I’m hoping,’ she says. ‘I have my fingers crossed.’

The new phase of Moore’s career – Tony Curran calls it ‘the Celtic revival’ – may be in full swing, but the old fear that this job will be her last never quite goes away. ‘You wish there were some point where you could go: “It’s done. I can relax.” But I don’t think there ever is.’