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‘I need to feel alive’: Julianne Moore on family, friendship and mortality

Few actors are as endlessly versatile and compelling as Julianne Moore. Ahead of her extraordinary performance in the latest Pedro Almodóvar film, she opens up about love, death and the complexity and richness of ordinary lives

In her 40-year career, which has spanned auteur’s art films like the exquisite Safe, to huge blockbusters like The Hunger Games, as well as award-winning dramas like Still Alice(for which, after many nominations, she won her Oscar in 2014) and recent TV work like the audacious Mary & George, Moore has played characters who are defiant and struggling, sometimes deviant, trapped in an often-gorgeous prison of domestic horror. Almodóvar wanted Moore for the role because he knew she could appear “terrified, friendly, compassionate, angry, understanding, stony, slightly eccentric, tender, empathetic but without going too far, fearful and daring at the same time”, he says. We’re staring at each other now, a sort of mutual terror on the table between us, and I find myself apologising for asking questions about the horrors of being alive on such a fine morning and she chuckles merrily while pulling the band from her ponytail.

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