The 1993 movie Julianne Moore will always regret: “A terrible film and a terrible performance by me”
Before Julianne Moore broke through with her phenomenal performance in Safe, the actor found herself in a small handful of movie roles, one of which proved to be one of her biggest regrets. At least she got one of the worst moments of her career out of the way early doors.
It’s only natural that an actor will make mistakes when they’re new to the industry, but that inexperience sometimes results in a performance that they’d really rather have scrubbed from existence. Of course, that’s just not possible, though.
Moore has had to come to terms with this because one of her earliest roles was in the terrible Madonna erotic thriller Body of Evidence, a film so bad that it had the potential to ruin the start of her career. Luckily, roles in the likes of much better films such as The Fugitive and Robert Altman’s Short Cuts that same year saved her from utter disaster.
Still, she couldn’t shake the humiliation of Body of Evidence, which she admits is a terrible film. But not only did she regret the movie because it was so bad, but she also shudders to think how her lack of experience in the industry led her to some unnecessary nude scenes, which she wouldn’t have done if she’d known how pointless they would be to the plot.
The actor isn’t against filming nude scenes (she was in Boogie Nights, for Christ’s sake), but if it feels gratuitous, then she’s not interested. Body of Evidence made Moore uncomfortable, but she learned to only take on such an intimate scene if it felt right.
“You just hope you’re in a situation that’s safe,” she told the Los Angeles Times, “I did a nude scene in Body of Evidence that was just awful. I was too young to know better. It was the first time I’d been asked [to get naked], and it turned out to be completely extraneous and gratuitous. Ugh.”
Nude scenes will always cause controversy because gratuitous sex scenes, all shot from a rather leering male gaze perspective, are all too common in Hollywood. To be done right, they need to be handled with real care, and Moore can’t really say that Uli Edel’s film was the greatest space for nurturing the right environment for such a vulnerable scene.
Body of Evidence was panned, with most critics agreeing that this was nothing more than a lazy vanity project for Madonna, whose acting career wasn’t exactly very impressive at this point. It was a low point for Willem Dafoe, too, with the film sticking out as one of the worst of his career. For Madonna, though, it was just another addition to a terrible pile of roles that defined her rather questionable dabble in a big-screen career.
Explaining just how much she hated the movie, Moore added, “It was a terrible film and a terrible performance by me. It was about nothing, and I didn’t need to be doing it”. Most actors have a regret like Body of Evidence somewhere within their filmography, and Moore has luckily starred in enough great movies since to bury the film, so to speak, trying her best to scrub the evidence of her involvement from people’s minds.
