Julianne Moore, the guest on this episode of The Hollywood Reporter’s Awards Chatter podcast, is one of the greatest screen actresses of her time, or any other. The winner of an Oscar, an Emmy and a BAFTA Award, two SAG, Golden Globe and Spirit awards and three National Board of Review and Critics Choice awards, she has also been awarded the best actress prizes of the Berlin, Cannes and Venice film festivals. She has rarely been part of a film or TV project that wasn’t at least very good, and in which she herself wasn’t great.
Moore’s latest film, May December, is no exception. A Netflix dramedy in which the star plays a woman married to a much younger man (Charles Melton), who was underage when they first hooked up 20 years earlier. Her character is now being observed by a Hollywood actress (Natalie Portman), who is set to play her in a film. It marks Moore’s fifth collaboration with director Todd Haynes. For her performance, she already received a Golden Globe nomination; has pending nominations for Critics Choice and London Critics Circle awards; and seems likely to land her sixth Oscar nomination.
Chosen in 2020 by the film critics of The New York Times as “one of the 25 greatest actors of the 21st century so far,” Moore has been described by the Los Angeles Times as “a bona fide Hollywood star with strong indie roots who remains impossible to pigeonhole” and by The Guardian as “the most talented actress of her generation.” Slate wrote that she is a “human Stradivarius of an actress,” who “has been so good, for so long, in such a variety of better-than-average movies — is there any other A-list actress who’s chosen her roles with such consistently excellent taste, or collaborated with as many ambitious young directors? — that it’s easy to take for granted her steady presence in some of the best American cinema.”
Over the course of a conversation at the L.A. offices of The Hollywood Reporter, the 63-year-old reflected on her nomadic childhood and how it led her to acting; the most important roles of her career, including those in 1995’s Safe, 1997’s Boogie Nights, 1998’s The Big Lebowski, 2002’s Far from Heaven, 2010’s The Kids Are All Right and 2014’s Still Alice; her special relationship with Haynes; plus much more.
