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Ahead of her new film – in which she fights, dives and wrangles horses – the Oscar-winning actor discusses sunburn, age-gaps and hanging from helicopters
Julianne Moore has played some right mothers in her time. There was Amber Waves in Boogie Nights, whose pornography career and cocaine addiction costs her access to her child. Or Maude, the outre artist – “My work has been commended as being strongly vaginal” – whose determination to conceive drives much of in The Big Lebowski. Moore was the infernal, domineering mother – the Piper Laurie role – in the 2013 remake of Carrie, and a lesbian cheating on her partner with the sperm donor who fathered their children in The Kids Are All Right. In May December, the most recent of the five pictures she has made with her artistic soulmate, the director Todd Haynes, she became pregnant by a 13-year-old boy, then married and raised a family with him after her release from prison. Shocking, perhaps, but then she had already played a socialite with incestuous designs on her own son (Eddie Redmayne) in Savage Grace. Imagine that lot as a Mother’s Day box set.
Her latest screen mum is in the jangling new thriller Echo Valley. She has a lot of heavy lifting to do as Kate, a morally compromised rancher whose farm is falling apart, along with her life. Some of that lifting is emotional: Kate left her husband for a woman (“I’m the one who ‘ran off with the lesbo ranch hand’,” she sighs) who then died. To add to her woes, Kate’s daughter (Sydney Sweeney), who has addiction problems, calls on her for help after accidentally throwing away $10,000 worth of drugs belonging to a dealer (Domhnall Gleeson).
Some of Moore’s heavy lifting in the film, though, is literal: there is a corpse-disposal sequence that does not go off without a hitch. This is all handled expertly by the British film-maker Michael Pearce, who made his debut directing Jessie Buckley in Beast and therefore has form when it comes to putting tenacious redheads in jeopardy.
“Michael and I talked about how we didn’t want Kate to be a superwoman,” says Moore, 64, perched on the edge of a sofa and sipping tea in a London hotel room. She is wearing a long-sleeved charcoal-grey dress, burgundy nail varnish and gold tear-drop earrings that swing in and out of her hair, playing peek-a-boo whenever she moves. “You shouldn’t think she’s capable of much when you see her. She can barely get out of bed. When she meets Domhnall’s character, you’re like: ‘Oh my God, he’s going to destroy her!’ Most of us aren’t action heroes. I’m not The Rock, right?”
Yet Echo Valley does teeter at times on the border between thriller and action movie. “I didn’t see that on the page,” she admits. “But there are these physical fights, stuff with horses, there’s all this water and diving and pulling and carrying. It’s exhausting!”
We puzzle together over whether she has strayed into action territory before. “I guess in The Lost World,” she says, citing the Jurassic Park sequel, a mediocre movie with one killer suspense sequence: Moore in an upended Winnebago dangling over the edge of a cliff, a splintered windscreen the only thing standing between her and certain death. And there was the overcooked Hannibal, where she took over as the FBI agent played by Jodie Foster in The Silence of the Lambs. “Yeah, Clarice is kind of an action hero.” Has she turned down many such parts? “Because they were too action-y?” she exclaims, laughing up a storm. “That’s really funny! I have, on occasion, turned things down if it’s something that was taking place outside, like, all the time with no shade. ‘Guess what? We’re shooting at the beach every single day!’ That would be tough.” She gestures to her pale skin and copper hair. “I would incinerate.”
Action heroes have been few and far between, but she can’t identify any other gaps on her CV. “I don’t think that way. I’m always thinking in terms of story. Hey, I’d like to do a ghost story! I’m fascinated by those because they’re about grief. But character for me doesn’t exist outside narrative.”
Later, I email Wash Westmoreland, who, with his late husband Richard Glatzer, directed Moore as a linguistics professor with early-onset Alzheimer’s in Still Alice, which won her a best actress Oscar. He points out how she can pivot the tone of a scene with a simple line reading. In Haynes’s Far from Heaven, she was a hemmed-in 1950s housewife with a closeted husband and a taboo friendship with her Black gardener. “To access a character through the acting style of a different era while bringing nuance and emotional truth to it was a tour de force,” he says.
Near the end of the movie, when it becomes clear that her husband can’t curb his appetites, she adopts a newfound resignation and froideur, telling him: “I assume, then, you’ll be wanting a divorce.” Westmoreland singles out that moment: “The shift in her voice and demeanour is so dramatic. It’s the stuff of great cinema.”
For Echo Valley, Moore dwelt on the areas where her character was morally compromised. “She makes a series of choices that are complicated,” she says. “You step back and ask: ‘Wait, is this appropriate parenting? Are you managing your child’s addiction rather than giving them the agency to change?’ There’s a lack of clarity about Kate’s behaviour. Does she do the right thing? I don’t know. Is it cinematic? Oh, it’s definitely that.”
With her husband, Bart Freundlich, whom she met nearly 30 years ago when he directed her in the indie drama The Myth of Fingerprints, Moore has two children: Cal, 27, is a musician who teaches composition; while Liv, 23, is an assistant at a talent agency. Asking herself what she might do as a mother in Kate’s position, however, would have done her no good. “That kind of thought isn’t always helpful. Because if it’s me, well, I’m not going in a lake. Are you kidding? It’s cold! But that doesn’t occur to Kate.”
When Moore’s career exploded in the 1990s, with eye-catching roles in mainstream smashes (The Hand That Rocks the Cradle, The Fugitive) and indie masterpieces (including Robert Altman’s Short Cuts and the chilling Safe, her first film with Haynes), she was presumably the greenhorn on set. I wonder how it feels to have gravitated to a possibly maternal position with Sweeney in Echo Valley or Meghann Fahy in the crackling new Netflix comedy Sirens. “What’s fabulous when you’re on set with people of a different age is that it’s always a peer relationship,” she says. “You go in at, say, 24 and it’s terrifying, but everyone expects you to meet them emotionally.”
She experienced it on the set of Louis Malle’s Vanya on 42nd Street. “I was 27 and George Gaynes was 72 and I was supposed to be engaging in a romantic relationship with him, which felt crazy. But suddenly you’re doing this Chekhov piece and everything dissolves. You’re people without any barrier of age or experience.”
Perhaps it helped, too, that she was always treated as an adult by her parents. Her mother, who moved from Greenock on the west coast of Scotland to the US as a child, was a psychiatric social worker, her father a military lawyer and later a judge. They discussed openly the intricacies of human behaviour in ways that Moore believes helped cultivate her fascination with character and story.
Also vital was her sense of difference. Moore’s series of Freckleface Strawberry books for children were recently in the news after being put “under advisement” by the Trump administration in schools educating the children of US military personnel – presumably because of their message that being different is nothing to be ashamed of. Less well known is another of her autobiographical children’s books, My Mother Is a Foreigner But Not to Me.
How did she experience her mother’s nationality as a child? “Well, it’s very pertinent now given what’s going on with immigration in the US,” she says. “Many of us have parents who were from somewhere else, so that meant your parents had different customs or languages. My mother felt very different from the American mothers I knew. She had an accent. She cooked different things: nothing weird, just roast beef, for instance. We had little kilts. I had my hair braided and American mothers didn’t do that.”
Her Scottish background gives her a deep connection to Tilda Swinton, her co-star last year in Pedro Almodóvar’s The Room Next Door. An earlier Swinton movie, The Deep End, must surely have influenced Echo Valley: both are water-adjacent thrillers concerning mothers who go to extreme lengths to save their children from thugs. “Oh Tilda, my Tilda!” she cries, clamping a hand to her chest. “I love her.” She reels off the similarities between them with a level of excitement that suggests they are only now dawning on her: “She’s Scottish and I’m Scottish-American. We both have red hair. Our children – her twins and my oldest – are the same age. And both of our sons have red beards. Isn’t that funny?”
At that moment, she starts waving at someone behind me. “Michael, come on in!” she calls out to Pearce, who sits down beside her for the final 10 minutes of the interview. They are both in matching greys. “You got the memo,” she jokes.
Throughout our conversation, Moore has been friendly, but always precise: at the end of each answer, she pulls up sharp, smiling tightly in a way that signals she has completed her thought. In Pearce’s presence, she loosens up a little, pinging ideas back and forth and even urging me on when I ask him something – “Good question!” – in a way that makes me feel I have been awarded a gold star.
It’s no mystery why he cast Moore in Echo Valley. “She plays these everyday people – someone beside you at the checkout or on the train – but they’re going through these momentous crises,” he says. “Still Alice, Short Cuts, Magnolia: there’s never anything generic in what she does. It’s always the most specific and memorable version of that crisis.”
This is what was needed for Echo Valley. “It lives or dies on the performances. We can’t only rely on the plot mechanics. You need to be a bit heartbroken by this film. And because “Julianne’s done so many movies, she has this intuition for what works. When it came to the heaviness of the film – the grief, the addiction – she said: ‘Some of this can be done with a light touch.’ We didn’t need to show all the crying.”
Moore is thinking about The Rock again. “When you see him, say, hanging from a helicopter, you’re like: ‘I can’t do that. That’s not going to happen.’ But when you see these people in domestic situations dealing with desperation and violence and grief, you think: ‘I recognise this. It exists all around us.’”
