Middle Age Hollywood

Julianne Moore talks about going the extra mile in another erotically charged role in Chloe.


Julianne Moore is a true rarity. It’s not just that her hair flames like no other star since Katharine Hepburn. Or that alone of her generation she seems impervious to middle age’s indignities – she is 50 this year. There’s something else. Having worked with dinosaurs in The Lost World and a cannibal in Hannibal, she is mainstream enough to be considered a genuine leading lady. But much of her most eye-catching work, often written for her by indie directors like Todd Haynes and Paul Thomas Anderson, is fiercely extreme in spirit.

Pornography, incest, erotica of various hues – hers would be bargepole roles for most actresses. But Moore isn’t most actresses. She is the closest the English language can boast has to a French actress. Hence Chloe.

Adapted from Anne Fontaine’s Parisian three-hander Nathalie (2003) Moore plays a Toronto gynaecologist who, suspecting her husband (Liam Neeson) of infidelity, commissions a prostitute to seduce him and report back: this is Catherine’s creative way of looking for clues which might explain why the spark has exited the bedroom. It’s a thoroughly French scenario, given a cool Canadian twist by Atom Egoyan.

It turns out that Moore didn’t actually know about Nathalie. “They told me it’s based on a French film,” she says, "and I didn’t watch it deliberately because I’m incredibly suggestible and I didn’t want to be in a place where I felt like I was doing Fanny Ardant. Chloe takes the idea of the French film,” she adds, “and goes that much farther.”

Like much of Moore’s best work, this is an understatement. In both films, gynaecologist and prostitute grow intriguingly co-dependent. In Nathalie, the emotional connection threatens to turn sexual, but no sooner is that door opened that it’s closed again. Egoyan barges right on through. The result is that Moore and the comely Amanda Seyfried - 24 years her junior - find themselves acting out every male fantasist’s softly lit girl-on-girl scenario. What on earth did Moore think when she read the script?

She emits a startled laugh. Projecting an air of such peachy comfort in her own skin, of open-minded clarity of thought, I can’t quite tell if the laugh betrays something vulnerable.

“It made me nervous,” she concedes. “It’s tricky stuff to do. Had this come to me with somebody other than Atom attached it would have really given me pause. Honestly, unless you’re in Catherine’s decisions every step of the way, then yeah, it can be prurient or salacious. Obviously there’s something inherently dangerous about doing a scene like that, but it was all very deliberately staged, we watched playback, we were able to adjust things.”

According to Moore, the film needs the sexual encounter – and as a preamble to Egoyan’s revamped ending, perhaps it does. The interesting thing, she says, “was that in the scene I won’t look at her. The line that Catherine is drawing is about sheer fantasy, it’s about how do I get back to him, so she says, 'Show me, how does he do it?’”

It’s another erotically charged role in which Moore goes the extra mile. How does she do it? “It’s not like I ever intend to!” she protests. “I never do. I think it’s happened a lot of times because I’m involved in things that are love stories. There are times when I feel it’s absolutely not necessary at all.” She cites Savage Grace (2007), an Oedipal saga based on a true story in which a boy bloodily terminates his mother’s incestuous obsession. “My character had some nudity and I said, 'I’m not doing it. It’s really not right for this.’”

Moore plays a lot of troubled mother figures. She suddenly leaks tears at the memory of her own Scottish-born mother, who died last year. The weeping interviewee is seen in some journalistic circles as an interviewer’s Holy Grail, but I’m not so sure. weird It happens when I ask her, having played the odd Englishwoman, how Scottish she feels.

“I look just like her,” she says. “When I was growing up people would always say, 'Why does your mother talk so funny?’ And she did. She had an accent for a very long time. When her mother died that was when she kind of lost it, because she didn’t hear it any more.” And now Moore can’t hear her mother’s. lol lame

“Sorry I fell apart,” she offers. awww it is okay bb In fairness, the sight is familiar. Much her most exposing role was in Far from Heaven (2002), Haynes’s pastiche of the Fifties weepie in which Moore matchlessly embodied a fey housewifely brittleness (she used some of the same brushstrokes in The Hours). Here the nakedness was all emotional: she was entirely clothed. “And pregnant,” she volunteers. Did the raging hormones make a difference? “I don’t think so. It was my second trimester when generally you feel OK. The great thing for me was that it distracted me. I was pregnant in The Big Lebowski too.”

Her son and daughter are now 12 and 7. The family lives in Manhattan where, in 2007, Moore was persuaded to make a prodigal return to the stage – before she was scooped up by cinema at 30, all her work was in theatre and cheesy television. The play was The Vertical Hour, David Hare’s thinkpiece on the morality of warmongering in the Gulf. She made friends, particularly with her co-star Bill Nighy. But for her it didn’t quite work.

“It’s very difficult to do when you have kids because the hours are fairly extreme. I did find it particularly difficult to do Broadway. It was not my favourite way to perform. When I do theatre I like it to be smaller, I like the audience to be closer, I like it to be less presentational.”

For a mistress of the filigree nuance, working in such subtle gradations of period-sensitivity, that makes sense – see her alcoholic divorcee in A Single Man. But Moore yearns to explore other areas of her palette. She was hilariously slow-witted in Robert Altman’s Cookie’s Fortune (1999) and regrets the lack of opportunity to make audiences laugh. “I like any kind of situational comedy. It breaks my heart that I’m not going to be in it.” In fact she recently guested in 30 Rock.

But honestly, are there any circumstances in which she’d do gross-out comedy? “I think just about any,” she says. What, even gel her with semen? “Oh sure! I thought Cameron Diaz was great in that movie. I really enjoy watching all that kind of stuff. Really you want to have variety as an actor. If you spend your career doing one thing solidly, people get burned out.” No evidence yet.

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