Less Is Moore  
How does the incomparable Julianne Moore—who plays troubled housewives in two new films, Far From Heaven and The Hours—manage to reveal so much of herself on-screen while remaining, at heart, an absolute mystery? Wouldn’t you like to know.
Source: W
Date: 12/1/2002


The baby hasn’t pooped since Saturday, Dad’s on the back nine of some golf course in Hawaii, four-year-old Caleb is sliding across the floor in his socks, practicing his “grand finale,” and Mom—well, let’s just say Mom is feeling a little crabby.

Or so she claims. Julianne Moore’s alleged crabbiness is no more apparent than are any of her other emotions—that is, when they’re not burning a hole in the screen of your local art-house cinema. Seated cross-legged on a nut-brown Vladimir Kagan sofa in the living room of the Greenwich Village loft she shares with her partner, the director Bart Freundlich, and their two children, Moore actually seems the very picture of serenity—warm and affable and impeccably poised.

But who knows, really? Her singular power as an actor—and there’s no one better at playing everyday women pressed to their psychological limits—has as much to do with what she keeps hidden as what she exposes. She’s a master of veils who can perform a scene naked from the waist down, as she famously did in Robert Altman’s Short Cuts, while remaining somehow ineffable in the ways that really count (which is why the turn earned her a reputation as a serious actress instead of a trashy babe). Moore’s exceptionally fair, copiously freckled skin is not nearly as translucent as it seems.

“People always say to me, ‘I don’t know who you are,’” she admits with a sphinxlike smile. “And I think, if anything, my work is the most revealing thing about me.”

By her side, as ever, is Moore’s six-month-old daughter, Liv, a dark-haired beauty with a bright, toothless slash of a grin, thirsty eyes and bountiful cheeks. The baby lets fly with a delighted squeal, and for the moment at least, the two-time Oscar nominee and Revlon girl is thoroughly upstaged—although one suspects that Moore, a private and exceedingly down-to-earth person who somewhat mysteriously has managed to excel in a very public and vaporous business, is all too happy to share the limelight.

Besides, she’ll receive all the notice she can handle this fall as her two latest films arrive in theaters. In Far From Heaven, Todd Haynes’ affectionate recreation of the achingly melodramatic “women’s films” of the Fifties, she plays Cathy Whitaker, a Connecticut housewife who seems the very picture of domestic virtue until she discovers that her husband (Dennis Quaid) is sleeping around—with men—and forms her own scandalous attachment to the African-American gardener (Dennis Haysbert). And in The Hours—costarring Nicole Kidman and Meryl Streep and based on Michael Cunningham’s acclaimed literary riff on the Virginia Woolf novel Mrs. Dalloway—she plays Laura Brown, a young wife and mother living out her own nightmarish version of the postwar American dream and contemplating a desperate escape.

Which is why it’s slightly jarring to find Moore busily playing homemaker herself, taking an extended leave of absence from moviemaking for a few laps around the mommy track. Although she’s clearly relishing her time at home, she nonetheless points out, “With work, you have a little downtime, but not with kids. There’s always some school thing, some doctor appointment, some play date. Like last night, Liv was up until three in the morning. Her dad’s out of town, and I had them both in bed with me, and I had to calm her down without waking up her brother because he had to go to school. So you just feel all this stress. And you’re always afraid that you’ll do something wrong, you know? I mean, you could kill them!”

“Julie’s a worrier,” explains her best friend, Ellen Barkin. “She’s a wonderful, wonderful mother—totally devoted to her kids—but she’s very overprotective. When the kids are playing by the pool, she’s just a wreck, and they don’t have to he doing anything dangerous! She goes mental when we’re at the ocean and Bart takes Cal in the waves.”

Barkin, the Laverne DeFazio to Moore’s Shirley Feeney, also notes that the actress is a housekeeping fanatic whose compulsive tidiness would seem to rival that of Cathy Whitaker. “It’s a mania,” Barkin says. “She loves to straighten, to wash, to polish. She’s very…you know that word I’m not going to say When we go out at night, I’ll be in bed by 11:30, and she’ll be up until two. Cleaning.”

“I am pretty scrupulous,” admits Moore, who suspects she may have a touch of obsessive-compulsive disorder. “I straighten up constantly. I like the accomplishment of it. You do it and you see the results. And I like having things in order. It makes me feel like I have some sense of control over my life.”

Moore’s home is indeed spotless, a bright duplex loft decorated with the work of contemporary photographers such as Thomas Struth (represented by a monumental forest landscape), Nan Goldin, Philip-Lorca diCorcia and Gregory Crewdson. Her other “burning passion,” she says, is mid-century modern furniture, and pieces by the likes of Jean-Michel Franck, George Nelson and Charles and Ray Eames, in addition to a few items salvaged from the set of Far From Heaven, are sprinkled throughout the space. (And then there’s that cowhide rug in the foyer, which bears a striking resemblance to the one in porn impresario Jack Horner’s ranch house in Boogie Nights.)

No doubt it was the itinerant life of an army brat, as the eldest child of young, hard-working parents (Dad went to law school and Mom got two advanced degrees, all while raising three kids and traveling around the world from one military base to another) that shaped Moore’s instinct for control and concealment and helped turn her into a consummate observer of human behavior. Moving often from town to town, she says, “taught me to adapt to another set of social rules very quickly. You’re always on the fringe, and you’re never fully invested, because you know you’re going to leave. But I didn’t want to be different, I didn’t want to be noticed. I wanted to be normal. And that’s the school that you use as an actor.”

Shortly after graduating from Boston University, Moore landed a regular gig on “As the World Turns” playing half sisters, one naughty, one nice. Then she stole the show in the overheated maternity thriller The Hand That Rocks the Cradle with a supporting part as a real estate agent done in by an imploding greenhouse.

But it wasn’t until she began working in independent films, with 1994’s Vanya on 42nd Street, that Moore’s unique affinity for characters struggling to maintain their purchase on normalcy began to reveal itself. In what remains one of her finest performances, she played Yelena, the warm, much-admired young wife of a pretentious blowhard. Yelena puts on a brave front in public but weeps uncontrollably the second she’s left alone. “I was so happy when that happened,” she recalls of Yelena’s breakdown, a scene she felt she’d finally cracked only after years of playing it onstage. “I actually burst into tears, and I was really pleased!” One of her primary goals as an actor, she says, is moving past a character’s facades, “and there are a million of them.”

Indeed. As Marian, a painter who once strayed from her marriage vows, in Robert Altman’s Short Cuts, she deflected her husband’s sarcastic darts with a marvelously flat affect until explosively baring her soul—and yes, incidentally, her ass—in a torrent of pent-up guilt and rage. In Safe, her breakout role—which, like Far From Heaven, was directed by Todd Haynes—she portrayed a California housewife, Carol White, whose mysterious allergy to contemporary life, diagnosed as “environmental illness,” might best be understood as a sort of toxic-shock reaction to her own carefully manicured veneer of yuppie contentment.

Carol’s sudden nosebleed, at a girlfriend’s baby shower, is perhaps the most terrifying example of what’s come to seem the signature Julianne Moore moment, when the mask begins to slip and a wellspring of sublimated emotions bubbles forth. It happens again and again, to the den-motherish porn queen of Boogie Nights, the photographer Dora Maar in Surviving Picasso, the rage-filled daughter in The Myth of Fingerprints (during the making of which she began seeing Freundlich) and the tormented trophy wife in Magnolia.

“She’s brilliant at unraveling,” Barkin says. “She’s the best.”

Haynes agrees. “Julie’s definitely drawn to that breakdown of a character’s facade,” he says. “What’s also really interesting is that she allows that surface to be expressed in the first place. Most contemporary actors try to be emotionally available at all times, but with her, there’s always something a little inscrutable, which enlists a far greater need to pay attention and wonder what’s behind it. But even when the surface falls, there’s something that’s still withheld, I think. And that’s a really powerful and courageous instinct.”

What makes such moments so riveting to watch is that they’re every bit as cathartic for Moore as they are for the characters she’s playing. “I love it,” Moore says. “You discover things in the middle of doing it, you find your trigger points. It’s not like pushing on a sore tooth—although some people say they do that—but there’ll be a memory. Something happens, and you’ll have an immense understanding of yourself, just when you’re not expecting it.

“The exciting thing to me,” she continues, “is to have that happen on camera. I’m there with the other actor, and we go, and then I have this experience on film, and it’s like, ‘Oh!’ And it’s kind of exciting and shocking—and you’ve actually felt something. So it’s as authentic as you can make a fake thing be.”

There’s a perfect example of this, Moore says, in Far From Heaven, as Cathy comes to terms with the fact that her model marriage is really coming to an end. The script called for her eyes to well with tears, but when the camera rolled, she recalls, “I just couldn’t stop crying. Todd had to cut it down. I was just sobbing and sobbing, and I didn’t know why. But I thought, ‘Oh, okay, you can let the character lead you.’”

It’s not hard to see a connection between Moore’s gift for going to pieces in the name of art and her ability to keep it all together in life. “She’s the kind of girl who always did her homework right away,” Haynes theorizes. “She didn’t wait till the last minute. She’s very, very organized and very in control of her work and, I think, of her life as well, and she has a lot of energy that gets wound up with those instincts.”

“Julie is very restrained, and I would go so far as to say a little buttoned-up,” Barkin observes. “She’s not someone you see falling apart or having a little moment. But I think probably, in some way, every time she goes to work, she gets to do it on such an intense level, and that’s when she’s at her best. She’s incredibly powerful when she plays someone who’s at loose ends everywhere.”

Barkin recalls that when they first met, eight years ago, Moore’s prim demeanor and penchant for schoolmarmish outfits earned her the nickname Miss Jean Brodie. “We were both single at the time, and we’d go out like girlfriends now and then,” Barkin says mischievously. “And she’d come out in a little knitted, midcalf, black A-line skirt, of a heavy fabric; a little white button-down shirt with a Peter Pan collar; a black cardigan, and some clunky, like, nurse’s shoes. Black. That would be Julie going out to Chaya for a wacky, wild girls’ night out.”

Of course, Moore’s fashion sensibility has evolved quite a bit since then, as indicated by today’s comfortably chic ensemble: a pair of Earl jeans and a hooded gray pullover from Scoop.

Barkin, for whom teasing Moore has become a favorite diversion, says another “enormous point of ridicule” is Moore’s fear of any kind of physical risk “She’s ridiculous! Ridiculous! She won’t even get her hair wet. She’s like my Jewish mother.”

But while Moore readily acknowledges being “a big chicken,” she says acting makes it easier to overcome her fears. “In The Lost World, I had to fall with a harness on,” she says, pausing to soothe the baby—”Oh, oh, oh! Livy, Livy, Livy!”—for whom the novelty of doing press is apparently beginning to wear thin. “And in The Hours, there’s that thing with the water, which was very scary.” She’s referring to a dream sequence that required her to be weighted down and lowered into a tank. “I can do all that stuff on film.”

Nevertheless, it’s in the realm of emotions that her daring as an actress is most evident. Moore’s next film will be Tom Kalin’s Savage Grace, which deals with the murder of Barbara Baekeland, a film star and heiress to the Bakelite plastic fortune, by her troubled son and, it was alleged, incestuous lover.   

“I’m sometimes drawn to these really extreme things,” Moore says with a shy smile. “I read the script, and there’s some really horrific stuff in it, and I just thought, ‘Oh, no….’” She reaches down to smooth Liv’s tousled hair. “I think I’m going to have to do this one….”

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