Julianne Moore: Wanting Moore

Q: Will it be easy for you to take off?

A: It will; maybe a year because of the baby. You don't know how long, but I'm not planning to work for a really long time.

Q: You've been about as prolific as Samuel L. Jackson, who, even though he is a leading man, once said he gets insecure when he's not working. Do you feel that way, like all of this might stop if you don't move right on to the next one?

A: I understand it, and every actor feels that way--like one day it will all end. But that's not it for me. Once I finish a movie, it's no longer creative, no longer alive. It's over for me.

Q: Do you ever think that having too many movies in the marketplace will hurt your price, or your ability to leave audiences wanting more?

A: Those are business decisions that you kind of can't think about. If I want to do something it's because I really like the part, I like the script or the director and I'm interested in a creative way. Maybe you'll do a movie because it's got a chance to be commercial and it will make you some money. But I don't strategize that much about it.

Q: Well, when you do movies more for a business reason, some of them, like Evolution, haven't worked, while The Lost World did. Are you sometimes compelled to take these roles just to be in a big movie?

A: I did Evolution because it was a comedy, and I never get to do those. It wasn't because it was a big movie. It felt nice for a change to do something that wasn't very serious. I didn't have to cry once, which made me very happy.

Q: It has been a particularly numbing time for any New Yorker since September 11. You don't live far from the World Trade Center. Where were you when it happened?

A: We live very close, in the West Village. But we were at the Toronto Film Festival, about to show World Traveler and start our second day of press. We'd gone down to the lobby around 9 a.m., and were about to introduce the movie, when someone in the lobby said that something had run into the World Trade Center. We went right back to the room to watch television--myself, Bart and Billy Crudup. We turned on the TV and watched the second plane hit. Like everybody, we were stunned. The day went by and we stayed in that room. Thankfully, our son was with us. That would have been too scary to imagine. If he'd been in New York, I would have crawled home. As it was, Bart went right to the airport and rented two minivans, and we took everyone who wanted to go back once they reopened the border.

Q: What was it like when you got back?

A: When we drove back, it was dark and you couldn't see anything, really, but the smoke. You could see that even in the dark. Because we live below 14th Street, there was this police line. We had to show ID to get our car through. You could already see by then how extraordinary the people of New York were. We asked the cops if we could get them pizza, and the guy was like, "Oh, man, I can't eat anything else." He pointed to this big pile of food boxes behind him. But the devastation has been overwhelming and still is. It took a long time to process, the horrible idea that these people were just vaporized.

Q: What's it like being an actor in New York right now? Did you go to any benefits?

A: We went to the fireman's benefit organized by Denis Leary, and spoke to a lot of them. It was heartbreaking because you could see they just felt so guilty they had survived. Denis gave a great speech, saying, "You guys did a great job, go easy on yourselves." I gave a speech about my little boy, who just loves firemen. The thing about the firemen in the city is that they're just so good to the kids. They'll be on their way to a fire and they'll wave. I've taken my son on tours of the firehouse. I was talking to one of them about my little boy and he said, "Don't let your boy be a cop or a fireman." You'd never think about that, and it's terrifying. In the speech, I'd said that we didn't think he knew anything because when we were in Toronto, we kept him in the other room. We said there had been a fire, but we didn't go into what happened in the planes. Then two weeks later at dinner, he said, "Mommy, why did the firemen die?" We just lost it.

Q: What did you say?

A: We said they have very dangerous jobs, that they were saving people's lives in the building, and some of them got caught in the fire. We told him that it was going to be OK, that there wasn't going to be another fire. It's just awful, for the kids.

Q: Is your son aware of what you do for a living?

A: He knows that I act. He just thinks it's something people do. In school, they ask the kids what they think their parents do. He said, "Well, I think she acts, and he does real work." He'll see a poster, like on the subway, and he'll yell out, "Look, Mommy! That's your movie!" And I'll be like, "Shhhh." He has a heightened sense of what's make-believe, what is a movie. So he'll say, "I don't know why Jimmy is afraid of this. It's just a movie." He realizes.

Q: Tell me about The Hours. You star with Nicole Kidman and Meryl Streep. Did you bond with them?

A: I can't tell you because it will spoil the film. It's [about] three different women at three different points in time. It follows the arc of Virginia Woolf. One is Virginia Woolf, another is a woman nicknamed Mrs. Dalloway, because she has a lot of parallels to that character. A third character is reading Mrs. Dalloway, and that's me, a housewife in the '50s with a young child. There is some overlap but I can't tell you where because it will ruin the surprise.

Q: But you got to spend some time with Meryl Streep, or was it Nicole Kidman?

A: I can't tell you, stop it!

Q: Well, tell me under the guise that you could have run into each other in a corridor, while you were shooting different time periods. I just wondered how it was bonding with actresses you admire.

A: That's the best part of the job, getting to work with the actors and directors I have.

Q: So you had a bonding experience with important actresses, you just can't tell me who?

A: Yes, exactly.

Q: Did you do the movie because of the cast or director, or because you were a fan of the source material?

A: It was the book. I got it for my birthday a couple years ago, read it and loved it. I never thought it could be made into a movie, though, because it is so dense. Years go by, I hear there's going to be a movie of it and I get offered the part I liked best. On Shipping News, I was in Alabama and I got a call from Lasse Hallström and from Kevin Spacey. I got a voice on the cell phone and it's like, "Hallo, thees is Lasse Hallström, I want you to bee in my moovee," and then I hear, "Hey, this is Kevin Spacey." Things come about in different ways. The Hours was a no-brainer, because it was a part I so identified with. I would have torn out my eyeteeth to play that role. Shipping News was a lovely project, but I always wanted to work with Lasse and Kevin.

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