There are essentially two kinds of actors: the ones who are seen and the ones who see. The ones who play characters and the ones who study people. The performers and the informers.
Julianne Moore falls squarely into the latter, more rarefied, much, much smaller camp. Indeed, however unassumingly, she is its standard bearer. What makes her work so powerful, in films as diverse as “Far From Heaven” and “The Big Lebowski,” “Boogie Nights” and the forthcoming remake of “
Carrie,” is that, for this actress, playing a role is not about sunbathing in admiration but about admiring the rest of us, in all of our varied subjectivities. For Moore, taking on the vocal inflections, the mannerisms, the emotional undercurrents and psychic thunderstorms of another human being is essentially just a way of seeing us all more deeply. She looks deeper into her characters, inhabits them more fully, loves them more completely and with less judgment than just about any actor out there. As a result, her best work has, in some small but undeniable way, managed not just to entertain but to elevate and ennoble the rest of us.
To some extent, Moore’s signature approach may be an accident of physiognomy and upbringing. There is something uncanny about her appearance, at once beautiful and otherworldly. Flame-haired and lavishly freckled — “not the adorable few” but covered, as she puts it — she grew up acutely aware of being perceived as different. Her attempts to grapple with that fact and to overcome her insecurity inspired her best-selling picture book, “
Freckleface Strawberry,” which takes its title from a taunt often lobbed at her in the playground and has spawned two sequels and an Off Broadway musical. Her sense of otherness was heightened by the peripatetic childhood of a military brat, a blur of new schools, accents and cultures — and endless social puzzles to crack. Always a diligent pupil, she spent years studying
everyone else, trying very, very hard to pass among us as unobtrusively as possible.
Moore’s first appearance on stage was an exercise in being looked at, and she didn’t enjoy it a bit. She was in sixth grade, and she’d been cast as the Little Red-Haired Girl (a made-up role) in a class production of “You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown,” at Anne M. Dorner Middle School in Ossining, N.Y. “It’s not really a part, it’s an archetype,” Moore points out. “I sat on the stage and ate a sandwich while Charlie Brown talked about me. I was so scared. I didn’t get any pleasure out of that.” She has rarely if ever played “the girl” since.
Moore has considered the subject of archetypes in some depth, as they are, for better and worse, the raw material of most Hollywood movies. “That’s what a lot of entertainment is about,” she says, adding that such characters are “representative of things, but they’re not necessarily about people.” When portraying an archetype, the job is to perform, which is not quite what Moore does. “I really admire people who can do that. I really can’t,” she says. “Because my interest is mostly about story and character.”
Take, for example, her astonishing portrayal of Sarah Palin in last year’s “
Game Change,” a role that won her an Emmy Award and the praise of just about everyone who wasn’t the former governor of Alaska. Of course, she nailed Palin’s idiosyncrasies and speech patterns (which, after all, had been done before), but she also accomplished something much more difficult and meaningful: she helped restore a sense of Palin’s humanity, locating an actual flesh-and-blood person beneath the layers of ridicule and snark acquired during the hard-fought 2008 campaign. “I think whatever you do, you have to have a real amount of compassion for your character as a human being,” says Moore, who thought the pressure on Palin was unbelievable. “She was in a completely untenable situation,” but she was game and worked hard. “She had an incredible natural charisma,” Moore says, and a “crazy innate confidence.”
At 52, an age when decent roles can be hard to come by for women, Moore is working more than ever. “
What Maisie Knew,” a heart-wrenching indie in which she plays a narcissistic rock singer in the midst of a divorce — failing tragically to parent her young daughter, played by newcomer Onata Aprile — opens in May. It will be followed by “Don Jon,” the writing and directing debut of Joseph Gordon-Levitt, in which she plays a grieving widow who tutors Gordon-Levitt’s p*rn-obsessed mook in the mysterious joys of authentic lived experience, and sexual intimacy. (Moore has often been paired with younger men in her films, and her husband, the director Bart Freundlich, is nine years her junior.)
Then comes “Carrie,” based on the Stephen King novel, in which Moore plays the title character’s lunatic mother. Resisting the temptation to camp it up, Moore approached the part as she usually does: finding the confused and desperate woman beneath the surface. “The only family she has is this child, so when she starts to move away from her and into the world it’s incredibly threatening,” Moore explains. “All she ever does is warn Carrie about the outside world — ‘They’re going to laugh at you, they’re going to hurt you,’ — ’cause that’s been her experience.”
Suddenly she cracks an odd smile. “The horrible thing is she’s right!”
These days, it’s something Moore would know little about. Sitting in the back of a narrow French bistro near her home in Greenwich Village, she is a little unreal in person, her skin so fair and smooth it might have been painted by Vermeer. Her face is an elegant geometry of graceful planes, her green eyes impossibly almond shaped, readily crinkling up with Santaesque warmth but capable of unsettling flashes of fury or raw distress, a facility so many directors have captured on film. Her laugh is the real surprise — richer than one might expect and at times disarmingly silly. It comes out often as she talks about day-to-day life: the recent renovation of her family’s town house, her children (Caleb, 15, and Liv, 12), her obsession with furniture designers like Paavo Tynell and Harvey Probber.
And when it does, it’s hard not to think she might just be the most real person in the place.
She is just a vision in this outfit!!! I love absolutely everything.
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