Julianne Moore gives an excited little wave as I enter the room. “Hello, fellow redhead!” she exclaims.
Contemporary cinema boasts several esteemed gingers and strawberry blondes, including Jessica Chastain, Amy Adams and Christina Hendricks. Moore, the star of Pedro Almodóvar’s new film, The Room Next Door, remains the redhead’s redhead: our lady of the MC1R gene.
Since 2007 she has written Freckleface Strawberry, a sequence of seven children’s books, in which the young heroine frets over her pigmentation. It’s a familiar tale for anyone who spent their childhood wearing factor-50 sun cream in the shade. The stories have subsequently been adapted into a stage musical.
Moore holds up her arm: “They are still here,” she says. “The freckles haven’t gone away as much as I’d like, believe it or not.”
The Room Next Door, a euthanasia drama that won the Golden Lion at Venice, is the 23rd film from the beloved Spanish auteur. Following on from his recent short-form collaborations with Tilda Swinton (The Human Voice) and with Ethan Hawke and Pedro Pascal (Strange Way of Life), the film is Almodóvar’s first feature in the English language.
A Pedro Almodóvar film in English? It has been a long time coming. In 2022 the director stepped away from A Manual for Cleaning Women, a planned anglophone film starring Cate Blanchett. The director said in Venice that he had needed to find the right vehicle – and that he found it in What Are You Going Through, by Sigrid Nunez, “in the first chapter, when the character of Julianne goes to the hospital to visit her friend”.
“Even though the film is in the English language, it is still a Spanish movie,” Moore says. “It’s still his point of view and his rhythm. The language is not quite an English vernacular. It’s a little bit elevated, a little bit different and poetic. There were times when he was listening not for the words but for the musicality. He’d say, ‘I feel like the line goes down right here,’ or, “The line goes up.’ That was marvellous, because he’s directing the actual sound. We had to figure that out. We had to think about his elevated sense of fashion and beauty. And the way these women are shot. Our job was to figure out how we fit into that universe.”
Moore plays Ingrid, a writer of bestselling autofiction, who reconnects with an old chum from New York’s no-wave scene. Martha (Swinton) is a former frontline correspondent battling stage-three cervical cancer. Her only shot is a highly experimental immunotherapy treatment. A circumspect Martha talks about death, about her estranged daughter and, finally, about the possibility of assisted suicide. Ingrid responds with attentiveness and companionship. It is a delicate and quiet performance.
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“As an actor you’re always thinking, How do I bring my part to the scene?” Moore says. “I think that we all know from real life how important it is to be a good listener. When a friend really needs to unburden themselves, what are they asking you to do? Do they need you to come up with a solution for them or are they asking you to just listen? Martha is in a place of great need. She really needs to talk.”
The most striking image in The Room Next Door is the red door leading to Martha’s bedroom, the chamber where she intends to end her life. It’s an inversion Almodóvar used in Broken Embraces, from 2009, for a colour he frequently uses to flag inflamed passions or danger.
“I get asked what it was like to think about death all day,” Moore says. “Sometimes it was just there. But, really, the active nature of film-making means we are creating this universe day by day, with Tilda, with Pedro, with our DP [director of photography], with our production designer, with the props department and the grips, the electrics and everybody. Every day is a day of construction. Even though it was heavy thematically, there was a joyfulness because we’re all building something together.”
The Dead, the short story by James Joyce, provides a cornerstone for Almodóvar’s screenplay. As the women make preparations for death, they watch the screen adaptation by John Huston. The script is bookended by the famous last passage in which the narrator ponders snow “faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead”.
Moore has now (sort of) completed the holy trinity of Irish literature. In 1999 she played the Victorian femme fatale Mrs Laura Cheveley in Oliver Parker’s adaptation of the Oscar Wilde play An Ideal Husband. A year later she starred as a disembodied mouth in Neil Jordan’s staging of Samuel Beckett’s Not I. Joyce was only a matter of time.
“I rewatched The Dead before we did this movie,” she says. “There’s a moment in The Dead that I had almost forgotten about until I rewatched it. And it’s so brilliant. We’re at the end of the film when Anjelica Huston talks about the boy she loved, and everything that happened, and she’s weeping and weeping. And then he cuts back to her, and she has fallen fast asleep. You realise this woman has gotten all this stuff off her chest and she’s just exhausted. It’s so sweet and human and tender. It’s a great moment in cinema.”
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Moore credits her aptitude for reinvention to her perambulatory childhood. The daughter of an army colonel and a Scottish social worker, she had, by the age of 16, attended schools in Alabama, Georgia, Nebraska, Alaska, New York, Virginia, Texas, Panama and Frankfurt.
“We moved around a lot,” she says. “But one constant was reading. I love to read. Basically, going to the library to check out books. That’s where I felt I understood people. That’s how I learned that other people were basically like me. Then when I started acting, it just felt like I was reading aloud. It literally felt like the same process in my head. I don’t think I have ever had any interest in acting from a performative point of view, because I don’t feel naturally like a performer. I always came to acting from the point of view of telling a story.”
Moore set out her stall early, bouncing between the soap opera As the World Turns, Chekhov and the 1992 potboiler The Hand that Rocks the Cradle.
At 62 she can look back on a career characterised by such box-office hits as The Lost World: Jurassic Park, The Fugitive, the Hunger Games sequence, Children of Men and Kingsman: The Golden Circle. She has teamed up with Liam Neeson twice, for the action film Non-Stop and the thriller Chloe.
Her most iconic roles have helped shape contemporary indie cinema. Her appearance in Valkyrie costume during a bowling-alley-themed musical number in the Coen brothers’ Big Lebowski remains this writer’s favourite movie fantasia. She’s an ambiguous and misguided maternal porn star in Boogie Nights.
Still, Alice, featuring her Academy Award-winning turn as a linguistics professor with early-onset Alzheimer’s disease, was made for less than $5 million.
No wonder she can never guess what autograph and selfie hunters are going to reference.
“It varies from person to person, you know? There are people who love The Hours. There are people who love The Big Lebowski. There are people who love Savage Grace. There are people who love Safe. And then, every once in a while, there’s something out of the blue. I just finished a job in New York, and a teamster was driving me. And he leans back and says, ‘You know what I love? I love Evolution.’ Evolution? That movie about the aliens? But he loved it.”
Ivan Reitman’s sci-fi comedy from 2001 is, indeed, an eccentric film to pick as a Moore favourite.
She is a popular collaborator, with a long list of returning directors, including Robert Altman (Short Cuts, Cookie’s Fortune), Paul Thomas Anderson (Boogie Nights, Magnolia) and her director husband, Bart Freundlich (The Myth of Fingerprints). Her longest-serving creative partner is, however, the great Todd Haynes. They have made five films together so far, including the modern masterpieces Safe, from 1985, and Far from Heaven, from 2002.
“I’ve worked with such great artists,” Moore says. “It’s been the great privilege of my life. I love to be entertained. I love to be diverted. But I love working with someone who has a specific point of view on something that is hopefully even more than entertainment. Films about what it means to be alive, what it means to be a friend, what it means to be a partner. What it means to be a parent, what culture does to us, how gender shapes us. All of those things.”
Moore, who played the pioneering feminist Gloria Steinem in Julie Taymor’s 2020 biopic The Glorias, is happy to report that the discourse of the past decade has had a positive effect on the industry.
“Feminism has a long, long way to go, but one of the things that we always say is that we’re not a minority group, we’re not a minority interest. We are more than half of the global population. I do think that there has been progress since I was a young actor. There are more female directors. I just worked on a show where all the directors were women. I thought, Wow, I didn’t see this when I was 25.”
Meeting the genial Moore, you have to remind yourself that she has played some of the movieverse’s most memorable monsters. In Tom Kalin’s Savage Grace she is chilling and sensational as the incestuous, scene-making heiress Barbara Daly Baekeland. In Haynes’s May December she is a sobbing, shrieking arch-manipulator based on the convicted paedophile Mary Kay Letourneau.
“When I was a kid I thought traffic lights were a miracle,” Moore says. “I would say to my parents, ‘Why does everybody stop at a red light?’ How have we all agreed that? And we have. Because those are the rules of society. There are behavioural rules that apply to everyone. But not for these people. So you try to figure out why: why do they not respect those boundaries?”
She has no difficulty in walking away from dark material. For a woman who has been in the public eye for more than a quarter of a century, she lives a “normal life” with Freundlich and their two grown-up children.
“Having children is the greatest energy,” she says. “You don’t have time to think about the work. It was, like, when they were little they’d be in the trailer at lunchtime – and let’s have lunch! I would come home and you give somebody a bath and we’d all eat dinner and go to bed and get up and do it again.
“And you realise that it’s so wonderful to have this great creative space in my life, where I can go and all this stuff happens. But I’m equally grateful to be able to go home to my regular life and shut the door.”
The Room Next Door is on general release
