“It changed me and my process”: Julianne Moore names the most important role she ever played
Julianne Moore has an Old Hollywood air about her.
It’s not just that she’s demonstrated a talent for reviving old-fashioned melodrama through films like Far From Heaven, The End of the Affair, and The Hours, but that she has consistently played the kind of meaty female leading roles that seemed to disappear with the careers of Bette Davis, Katharine Hepburn, and Joan Crawford.
As her body of work suggests, Moore didn’t enter Hollywood with the same mindset or track record as many other stars; she didn’t start out in sitcoms, wasn’t a delicate ingénue who blossomed into a leading lady, and she certainly didn’t become a star overnight. Although she technically achieved her first brush with fame through her dual roles on the soap opera As the World Turns, it wasn’t until she underwent a transformative theatre experience that she found her way into Hollywood.
She was working as a waitress and occasional actor on off-Broadway productions in 1990 when acclaimed experimental theatre director André Gregory (who you might know from the transcendent slow-cinema masterpiece My Dinner with Andre) invited her to join a troupe of actors who were workshopping Anton Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya. The goal was not to perform but to really understand it. In fact, they made a promise to never perform it for an actual audience.
“That informed my work more than anything else has,” Moore told AnOther Magazine in 2024, “I learnt that by being awake and aware the scene would surprise you, it would take you along with it”.
After more than a decade of acting on stage and in television, her understanding of her craft was born. “It changed me and my process entirely,” she concluded.
From that intensive theatrical experience, she entered the movies for the first time, making her feature debut in a film that was about as different from Gregory’s Chekhov experiment as it’s possible to get. Tales from the Darkside: The Movie is an anthology horror movie co-written by George A Romero that saw Moore playing a duplicitous college student who is killed by a mummy.
It might not have been the most worthy of scripts, but it did get the ball rolling, and within five years, she collaborated with Todd Haynes for the first time in the 1995 drama Safe. After a few years of dabbling in blockbusters (the Jurassic Park sequel) and romantic comedies (that terrible Hugh Grant vehicle Nine Months), Moore collaborated with Paul Thomas Anderson for the first time in Boogie Nights and transitioned from box office hits to prestige drama for good.
Interestingly, that pact about never performing Uncle Vanya in front of an audience was broken fairly quickly and in a big way. In 1994, the troupe made a film version of their workshop, called Uncle Vanya on 42nd Street. Directed by My Dinner with Andre director Louis Malle, it depicted the actors rehearsing and performing the play. It didn’t have much commercial potential, but it did win over critics. It also served as an early calling card for Moore, who was singled out for her performance by many reviewers.
