The Everlasting Thrill Of Acting For Julianne Moore

PHOTOGRAPHY David Roemer

STYLED BY Sarah Gore Reeves

Julianne Moore is one of the most stylish women on the planet. She’s walked the runway for Chanel, she has Tom Ford on speed dial, and she’s a front-row fixture at brands like Bottega Veneta and Dior. So it should be some relief to know that even someone with the couture-level access that Moore has faces the same style dilemma as the rest of us: finding comfortable-yet-fashionable footwear. “I'm happy to wear an uncomfortable shoe when I'm doing press or on a red carpet, but I refuse to do that in New York City. I cannot do it,” she says. “And it makes me mad! I'm like, ‘Why can't I find any shoes?’ Then I end up wearing an ugly pair of sneakers, or the same pair of boots until I'm sick of them.”

It feels wrong to reduce a woman like Moore—an Oscar-winning actor with nearly four decades of experience in the industry—down to her wardrobe choices. But while we talk about her off-duty fashion, the very first thing she does upon popping into our Zoom meeting is cheerfully comment on my red hair, immediately setting me at ease. She’s down-to-earth and thoughtful and real. All of that to say—shoe opinions included—Moore is clearly, for lack of a better term, a girl’s girl, the kind of woman who deeply values female friendship in her own life. 

"A friend is someone who witnesses you, who chooses to witness you, too. A romantic relationship is driven by something else, in a sense; you might feel a pull towards someone and a pull to make a family together. It's a different kind of a bond. But a female friend is someone who just decides that they like you, that they’re gonna go along for the ride. You reflect one another's experience in the world," she says.

"I have had these female friendships all along the way, and, at every stage of my life, they've proved to be unbelievably impactful and important; the companionship and the joy and the centering you receive with another woman—that notion that you're not going through something alone, that someone else has had an experience that's similar to yours, and that they're there to support you and care for you and tell you you're not crazy."

"It's so rare that you see a film about a female friendship."

Which brings us to Moore’s latest project, The Room Next Door, an adaptation of Sigrid Nunez’s novel What Are You Going Through. It’s the first English-language feature film from acclaimed Spanish director Pedro Almodóvar, and she co-stars alongside the equally talented (and equally fashion-forward) Tilda Swinton. On the surface, The Room Next Door is heavy: Swinton plays Martha, a woman diagnosed with terminal cancer who has decided she’d rather take a euthanasia pill than face more treatments; Moore plays Ingrid, the close friend Martha has requested to be by her side in the days leading up to her death. But at its core, The Room Next Door is about those friendships that have been so central in Moore’s own life.

“What's wonderful is that it’s so rare that you see a film about a female friendship. Often when you see women in movies, it's a mother and a daughter, or it's sisters, or they're lovers, or they're antagonists, but we don't ever get to see a straight-up friendship,” she says. “And yet, for most of us, that is one of the most important relationships we have, outside of our relatives. To see that dramatized, I think for both me and Tilda, it was really moving. It was profound, as women, to recreate that on screen.”

To watch Moore and Swinton perform together in The Room Next Door is, in ballroom culture and stan-internet parlance, a mother-off. (For those less online, it’s witnessing two iconic women give all-time-best performances at the same time.) Most of the film is a two-hander, with the actors deftly delivering Almodóvar’s signature formal dialogue in a way that feels completely natural. Moore’s Ingrid in particular is almost brutally real in her grief and discomfort with death, often refusing to allow Martha to finish pessimistic statements, or presenting a relentlessly optimistic face until the very end. Those lived-in tics and glimpses of humanity were crucial to Moore in playing Martha.

“I loved her optimism that decided that, 'Oh, it's gonna be okay. You're gonna try this. It's gonna be fine.' We all do that. We're like, 'You broke your leg. Don't worry; it's gonna take six weeks to heal. In the meantime, I'll show up and watch TV. It'll be fun,'” Moore explains. “I also loved her grumpiness and her irritability. She doesn’t even want to be there! It's hard to be faced by mortality, it's hard to be faced with sickness, and it's hard to be faced with pain and discomfort, and I thought it was interesting that Pedro was going to explore that discomfort.”

Of course, it certainly helps that Moore has Swinton to bounce off of in scenes. The two actors had only ever met in passing at industry events, but Moore says she’d admired Swinton’s work and hoped that a project might bring them together. The reality was even better than she could have imagined. “She was just incredibly open, incredibly available, really curious, and interested; she's a very, very committed performer. She has a great sense of humor. She's a tremendously beautiful actor,” Moore says. As soon as the SAG actors’ strike ended in 2023, Moore and Swinton headed to Madrid to start work on the project. Almodóvar likes his films to be extensively rehearsed, all the better to ensure a precision of language, a clear vision of how characters interact with one another, and how the production should look and feel. 

"There are always these places where people can see themselves, whether it is in a cinema, whether it is in streaming, whether it is on television."

“Our first meeting was in Pedro’s apartment, and we would go through the script, painstakingly scene by scene, and we'd read it, we’d read it again, and we’d read it again,” Moore explains. But more than that, those months together pre-filming allowed Swinton and Moore to gel as scene partners, creating a space where they could act out these emotionally tough, incredibly intimate scenes in a vulnerable and honest way. “I never felt that I was alone,” Moore says of her partnership with Swinton.

And working with Almodóvar was a dream as well. Moore never thought she’d get the chance, as all his previous films had been in Spanish. “It was a big surprise when I opened up my email in the morning and saw this note from Pedro saying that he's making this movie in English with Tilda, and he wanted me to join them,” she says. “I was absolutely astonished that it had come my way.”

Moore’s IMDB is a murderers’ row of the best directors of our time: Steven Spielberg, Paul Thomas Anderson, Ridley Scott, the Coen brothers, Todd Haynes, Julie Taymor. She has starred in everything from indie films to Hollywood blockbusters, romping comedies to heartbreaking tragedies, period dramas to modern thrillers. And she doesn’t limit her talents to the big screen. While the conversations about what the streaming era means for entertainment at large rage on, Moore is only interested in one thing: having the opportunity to be a part of a great story.

“When we talk about movies versus streaming versus theaters, what it boils down to, for me, is that there's always stuff. There are always stories. There are always these places where people can see themselves, whether it is in a cinema, whether it is in streaming, whether it is on television,” she says. “We keep making these stories, and the stories keep getting better and more complicated, as far as I'm concerned.”

“I'm excited by the fact that it's still something that I'm able to do, that I still find plenty of material, that I still feel like there are lots of avenues for it,” she continues. “I didn't think that my liking to go to play practice after school would lead to a lifetime of doing this, but it has, and it's been that simple too. I really have been very fortunate.” Acting is still very much about play for Moore, too. The joy of her career is getting the opportunity to try lots of different things and to wear many different hats. I ask her what skills she’s learned for roles, and she rattles off a diverse list: American Sign Language, opera singing, floral arranging, horseback riding, playing guitar, baking. (“I don't retain any of this,” she adds with a laugh.) “I love a teacher. I love an expert,” she says. “I'm really touched by teaching, by the generosity of people saying, 'This is a skill that I can share.'”

That love of learning, by the way, extends to her personal life: recently, she was swimming with her family, including her daughter’s boyfriend, and took the opportunity to brush up on her aquatic skills. “He's a really great swimmer, and I asked him to watch my stroke, because I'm not a great swimmer—I learned how to swim late and I hadn't had anybody watch me swim in a really long time,” she says. “He was so generous and thoughtful about his note. And he said, ‘You need to keep your arms straight, because I notice you're bending’—as I was swimming, I was drifting over. It was so helpful.”

"I think I have a funny relationship to fashion: I really like fashion in real life, but I also don't like to be looked at in real life."

Actors are very much gig workers, even established talents like Moore. They move from job to job, never knowing what the next opportunity might bring. It could be terrifying and destabilizing—and sometimes is, she admits—but there’s also excitement there, too. In a career retrospective with Vanity Fair, she compared getting acting roles to eating candy: when you’re eating it, you’re having the best time, and then when you’re done with it, you’re thinking about the next piece of candy. While she doesn’t dish on exactly what she has lined up next, there’s a very tasty piece of candy coming to her plate soon.

“I'm very excited about it because it's original and it's funny, and it's really human, and it's with someone that I really adore. It was a complete surprise. It was a complete gift,” she says of the project, set to start filming early next year. “It was another one of those things where I got a script and I read it, and I was like, ‘Are you kidding? You want me to do this?’ It was so much fun… it's so life-affirming and so amazing and so entertaining.”

But first, there’s the press run for The Room Next Door, already garnering Oscar buzz for its two stars. Any Julianne Moore appearance on a red carpet is a gift to fashion fans: so far this year, she’s worn a liquid gold dress from Bottega Veneta in Venice; a silver sequined Valentino gown to the Governors Awards; and a sculptural Schiaparelli number to the Mary & George premiere in London. It’s a thrill and a privilege for Moore to get to wear such beautiful things. Still, being the center of attention that way never feels normal, even all these years later.

“I think I have a funny relationship to fashion: I really like fashion in real life, but I also don't like to be looked at in real life. I don't like to draw attention to myself in New York, and I want to look normal and like everybody else,” she says. “I don't feel that fashion is armor. I probably feel the reverse. I feel exposed. If what I'm wearing is drawing attention to me, that makes me feel more exposed, not more protected, which is why, in real life, I don't like to wear anything that's gonna expose me.”

That’s part of how Moore returns to her everyday life: slipping out of those stilettos and putting the comfortable shoes back on. She uses her downtime to reconnect with that grounded self, catching up on things like sleep and reading, going on walks, spending time with her husband and her children and her dog—and, yes, her girlfriends. “That's where I draw strength and inspiration,” she says. “Going on a walk with my girlfriend and saying, 'Nope, you're not crazy.'”

HAIR: Orlando Pita HOME AGENCY
MAKEUP: Romy Soleimani MANICURE: Pattie Yankee
SET DESIGN: Jacob Burstein MHS ARTISTS
CREATIVE CONSULTANT: Mariana Suplicy
PRODUCED BY: Dana Bosland
DIGITAL TECH: Ernesto Urdaneta
LIGHTING TECHS: Harry Kong and Mike Sikora
STYLING ASSISTANTS: Daniel Zepeda, Ashlyn Brooks, and Izzy Lenoff