Oscar winner actor Julianne Moore (Still Alice?) reflected on her decades-long career during a Kering Women in Motion Talk at Cannes on Saturday, discussing female representation in film, how she selects her roles, amd why she admires Meryl Streep.
She kicked off the talk by saying that the prize is “a thrill and a tremendous honor”: “As an actor, you’re part of a gig economy… you’re going from one job to the next,” she said. “When you realize you’re being celebrated or asked to speak about what’s behind you, it’s like wow. This is something I created in my life. It’s a nice point of reflection and wonderful honor.”
“There’s not representation in C-suites, there’s not representation in media, there’s not representation in higher education. There are lots of places where we don’t have the representation we deserve. So I feel like it’s a bigger problem,” she said. “And how do you change that? I don’t know. It’s like, how does a mouse get through a wall? One bite at a time. You do it slowly, steadily, mindfully, making choices, speaking up, using your privilege, hiring more, talking about alliances, changing things for us on set.”
Moore strives to align herself with filmmakers who are “clear about whose story it is, how it’s being told and whether or not it’s accurate.”
As she’s progressed in her career and been able to be pickier with roles, there are some genres she’s just not interested in: “I’m less and less interested in tragedy, I would say,” she said. “Particularly now at a time when things are rough globally, it’s hard for me to invest in a story that I think is pretend, where I feel like the depth of the emotion doesn’t measure up to what’s happening in the world.”
“I don’t like someone being murdered. I don’t like explosions and guns. I don’t like histrionics. I don’t like things that raise the stakes without real feeling underneath. I mean, that actually bothers me because that’s like noise. I don’t know how to play it. I don’t want to watch it.”
Meryl Streep Is the Gold Standard
She also looked back on some of her famous roles, including The Hours alongside Meryl Streep. Asked how Streep inspired her in her career, Moore said: “She’s the gold standard.”
“I sort of grew up watching television and movies and seeing movie stars, and she was the first woman that I saw who appeared to be touchable and untouchable at the same time. There was something very human about her and something very modern,” Moore said. “Here was this actress who was like the next big thing, and she was so precise in what she did and so modern and so accessible and yet glamorous and wonderful and brave all at the same time. So I feel like she kind of lit a fire under everybody in terms of how we wanted to be, in terms of what we felt we could achieve in our work.”
