Julianne Moore has had an extraordinarily wide-ranging acting career. In the 40 years that she’s lit up the stage and the small and silver screens, she’s starred in independent films and blockbusters, action movies and rom-coms, soap operas and searing dramas, and that most divine of comedies, The Big Lebowski. Along the way, she has won sacks of awards, including a Bafta, several Golden Globes, aclutchof EmmysandaBestActress Oscar for playing an Alzheimer’s sufferer in Still Alice (which she reportedly keeps hidden at the back of a bookcase).
So is there anything else she’d like to achieve professionally? ‘It occurs to me that I’ve never played any kind of monster or creature, and I’m curious about that,’ she says. ‘What’s that like? How do you devise that identity? How do you know who they are? Do you make them human? Do you make them “other”? ’
Some might feel that in her latest film, the psychodrama May December, she has done just that. Moore plays Gracie, an apparently conventional and happily married mother who, it is revealed, spent time in prison after having an affair with a 13-year-old, Joe. Two decades later, the couple remain together, bringing up their family, but their fragile equilibrium is disrupted by the arrival of Elizabeth (Natalie Portman), an actress researching Gracie for a biopic.
‘I started digging around with the part, trying to figure it out, but I was like, oh my God, this is so hard! Gracie is a person who’s really tortured. It’s dark stuff,’ Moore admits. ‘What was interesting to me was the distance between the narrative she projects, of this great love story and the choice she was compelled to make out of love, and what actually happened. The transgression is so vast that there’s a tremendous amount of tension and emotional volatility underneath.’
Indeed, the unsettling black humour of the film lies in Gracie’s unceasing efforts to portray her life and marriage as a Mills & Boon fantasy, via her job as a home baker and a wardrobe that majors on the pink and frilly, while being unable to conceal the hysteria that’s just below the surface. ‘When you see Gracie lose it, that unbridled emotion is where she is all the time. Even in the scenes where she appears to be placid, there’s that underneath it, always,’ says Moore.
Her nuanced, disconcerting performance makes it hard to write Gracieoffsimplyasanevilpaedophile; indeed, leavingthescreening, I was surprised to find myself just as revolted by Elizabeth, who turns out to be as predatory and manipulative as her subject.
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