Julianne Moore
"A Single (Gay) Man's Best Friend"
Julianne Moore has emerged as one of Hollywood's most accomplished actresses of this era. She started out with supporting roles in major box office hits before she received a Best Supporting Actress nomination for Boogie Nights.
The academy recognition led Moore to a string of strong roles, many of them also receiving Oscar nominations, including another Best Supporting Actress nomination for The Hours and two Best Actress nominations for The End Of The Affair and Far From Heaven. Now at 49, Julianne is playing yet another potentially pivotal role as best friend Charlotte, also known as Charley, in the drama A Single Man, the directorial debut of fashion designer-turned-filmmaker Tom Ford. She shared with us how she first met Ford.
How did you first meet Tom Ford?
"I met Tom in 1998, when I was nominated for the first time for an Oscar," Julianne recalls, "He made me a dress. I came to meet him at the Beverly Hills Hotel with my infant son. Tom was so nice and charming and handsome and dashing. I had just had a baby, so I had big boobs and I was a little fat. I was all embarrassed. He was so great. He completely disarmed me. I couldn't imagine a fashion designer being that approachable and nice. I needed up not wearing that dress because my boobs were too big, I didn't want to put me all out there like that. He was fine and so nice about it. He was like, 'Who cares? It's just a dress. Whatever.' We stayed friends over the years. We had dinner together once in a while. He came to see my play on Broadway."
"And then I ran into him at, of all things, the Met Ball in New York," she adds, "I was walking by his table and he and his boyfriend, Richard [Buckley], were there. And I said, 'Hi, how's it going with your movie?' because I knew he was working on something, and they both lit up. He said, “Oh, I can't believe you mentioned it. I want to send you something.' And he sent me the script. He said, 'I'm so shocked you mentioned it. I wrote it with you in mind.” And I was really impressed. It was his adaptation
Julianne Moore
"A Single (Gay) Man's Best Friend"
of A Single Man. And I loved the part. I just loved it. I wrote him back, 'I really like this. Let's talk about it. I'd love to do it.' And he was like, 'Really? That fast? Really?' I said, “Yeah!” He was incredibly articulate about what he wanted to accomplish and how he thought. He obviously had a vision in abundance and has an incredible work ethic. He worked so hard and is so very well-prepared. I really felt like I was in good hands with him."However, despite her enthusiasm at the prospect of working with Ford on a film, Julianne says she never had read the original 1964 novel by Christopher Isherwood, of which the film is based on.
"I hadn't read A Single Man," she says, "I read The Berlin Stories and Don Bachardy, who was Chris Isherwood's boyfriend, had painted me when I did Short Cuts. So he still lives in that same house in Santa Monica Canyon they lived in for all those years. So we went there to be painted by Don. He painted all of us. Don talked so much about Chris. 'Look at this ashtray. It's from Berlin,' and all of that stuff. It was kind of crazy to meet Don again when you're doing this."
One aspect she was particularly intrigued by the openly gay Ford's film was how the show was on the other foot and there was male objectification rather than female objectification in the film.
"For someone like Tom, who loves women, but it wasn't like I was being shot in this sexualized way, the way Nick [Hoult] was objectified and all the floating asses," Moore says, "And I get to be beautiful and glamorous and fun and the best friend and I get jokes. It was a completely different experience."
"I have been in movies where they have shot up my legs or something like that," she continues, "I remember a TV movie I did where they asked me to turn around in a bathing suit and walk down the side of a pool. I was like, 'Oh my God!' I was 28 years old. And you do it. But it was a different experience with this. Why not have the gaze be male-on-male? It's all
Julianne Moore
"A Single (Gay) Man's Best Friend"
out there. We might as well see it in the movies. Even the male gaze on females is not always bad either, but it's nice to see it reversed once in a while too. Female-on-male is not so bad either."We asked Moore if she felt the least bit hesitant about doing the film because it was a male-dominated set.
"Hell, no!" she replies, "I was the only girl. What I really loved about the part, and I said this to Tom right away, is that relationship between a woman and a gay man, and I think it's one we're all pretty familiar with in real life. It's very rarely depicted in film unless it's in a campy way. So you see the strength and the reality of a 25-year friendship. I always like to talk about the elasticity of love, like when you really love somebody, how much you can take from them."
"You see they dish it out, like right in the middle of the scene, they start yelling at each other, and the dancing and the silliness," Moore continues, "And when he says to her, 'I can see you almost start to cry. I know you're faking it.' You know, all that stuff s a great celebration of a friendship. And also there's this particular kind of one where feelings can get misconstrued and obviously, she's thinking, 'If you love me this much, you can love me this much more.' I think the relationship holds so much."
The actress plays Charley, the best friend of British gay professor George Falconer, played by Colin Firth, who must attempt to go on with his life after his partner dies in 1962, during a time where gay tolerance was practically nonexistent. Moore shared with us some of that dancing and silliness with one scene where George comes over to Charley's for dinner, they dance, and then they argue.
"It was fun," she recalls, "It was super, super fun. Colin and I hadn't met. We actually met briefly at a hotel lobby in Toronto. But just like, 'Oh, Hi, how are you? Nice to meet you.' But that was it. And, shockingly, for people as old as we are and being around for as long as we have, we'd never worked
Julianne Moore
"A Single (Gay) Man's Best Friend"
together. Worked with him, worked with her, blah, blah, blah. We had a couple of near-misses. But we had a lot of mutual friends in common and we're pretty similar temperamentally. It was pretty loose and easy. When we got together, I realized he liked to talk as much as I do. I came just a few days ahead of time. Tom had rehearsal. We sort of blocked it out. And we basically chatted our way through it, making the scene real. We had a lot of jokes. It was pretty loose and pretty easy.""The scenes were pretty well-constructed," Julianne adds, "Tom cut them up into little pieces. Like he shot the walk, he shot the area on the couch, then the dinner table, then we moved to the dancing. So in that way, we were able to do it in little pieces. But in terms of how we felt about each other, that was just f-ing lucky, as they say. Colin and I were both like, 'Dancing? We don't dance! We're dramatic actors!' Tom was like, 'This is how you do the Twist.' We were like, 'OK!' It was humiliating initially, and then it becomes exhilarating and fun. We twisted until we were exhausted. And he edited it real nice too, so we don't look too goofy. The real Twist you have to keep your knees together. The real Twist is kind of stiff."
We asked Julianne if Ford gave her any pointers on how to effectively play her character in the film's 1962 setting.
"Well, you know what's interesting to me is we have this whole association of '60s of being a youth-culture thing, but I'm playing a 48-year-old woman in 1962," Moore notes, "So here she is listening to this modern music and doing a modern eye and having modern hair, but clearly, her heyday is in another era. So was George's. So it was kind of an interesting juxtaposition I thought to be someone who's trying to reach forward but who's also kind of stuck in her own life, a little bit behind."
This is not the first time Moore has played in a role in a film involving a gay man's need to openly express himself. In Far From Heaven, she played the
Julianne Moore
"A Single (Gay) Man's Best Friend"
housewife of a seemingly typical 1950's working man who discovers he is gay. Moore says she's ready for an increasingly devoted gay following with this new film."Bring 'em on, baby!" Julianne enthuses, "I'm always at the Pride parade! Come on! The GLAAD Awards, I've been to several times. They're a community that I'm very, very proud to know."
With the right to marry still a burning issue for the gay community in America, we asked Julianne if there was an important message behind A Single Man.
"Absolutely!" she replies, "I think Colin was saying that they were on the set the night that Barack Obama won, and that was also the night that Proposition 8 was passed. So you kind of think, 'Come on. Really?' In New York state, I'm ashamed to say, they voted down the gay marriage thing. That really surprised me."
"At this point, my children are growing up in a world where a lot of their friends have two mommies or two daddies," Moore continues, "They say, 'Who am I going to grow up and marry? Am I going to marry a boy or am I going to marry a girl?' They believe that that's what their options are. I believe we've become that way as a nation. Unfortunately, politically, it's just lagging behind. So I think it's always important to always draw attention to it until we fix the problem."
One particular scene with Moore and Firth that sticks out is a scene where Charley openly tells George that she feels their relationship isn't "real enough" for her because it's not sexual and it upsets him.
"I had a journalist ask me, 'Is Charley deliberately needling him?' Julianne says of the scene, "Of course she is. She's doing it on purpose. It's one of those moments when you cuddle up and you say, 'Isn't this so nice? You can forget about that guy. That didn't count and whatever.' And she knows she could possibly get a huge reaction, and she does. She knows what Jim meant to him."
"But what she's saying is, 'I love you, too. I want you, too,'" she continues, "She's displaying a tremendous amount of selfishness by saying it. What I liked about the dynamics or how Colin and I acted in
Julianne Moore
"A Single (Gay) Man's Best Friend"
that scene was how quickly it got out of hand. Like I didn't imagine we'd start yelling at each other. And that I liked, because in the rest of the film, there's been kind of this clamped-down, emotional tone. So I liked that when they're together, the emotion is kind of roiling. They don't have any need to hide anything from each other."Julianne said to us the kind of advice she'd give to someone as lonely as Charley.
"My advice to anybody, especially someone like her, who's stuck in the house all the time is to get a job," she states," Somebody said that Colin's character is being at a point of change, and the thing about Charley is that she's in stasis. You never, ever see Charley leave the house. She asks him to bring a bottle of gin. She won't get it. She probably has her food delivered. She probably has her friends bring things over. She's stuck.
"So Charley probably does go back to England," Moore adds, "As a matter of fact, the woman that Christopher Isherwood based this character on did go back to England. She did get kind of tired of it all in L.A., and she went home. So she would probably do the same."
We asked Moore if she was ever in love with a gay man that didn't want her in return.
"I was going to say, 'Only Tom Ford!'" Julianne laughs, "You can print that!"
A Single Man has already gotten a tremendous amount of accolades, such as being nominated for the Golden Lion at the Venice International Film Festival as well as even Oscar buzz. We asked Julianne if the prospect of another Oscar nomination concerns her at all.
"It's so nice to get a positive reaction to a film, because there have been many that haven't had a positive reaction," Moore replies, "So when you work really hard on something and you really love it, there's no guarantee that anybody else is going to love it. It can come out and be just like a big old thud. That doesn't change your experience."
"You're still thinking, 'I love that movie. Love what it said, but it doesn't get any kind of acclaim,'" she continues, "But when a movie comes out
Julianne Moore
"A Single (Gay) Man's Best Friend"
and people seem to respond to it? Fantastic! It's such a great thing, because you think, 'People will see it and enjoy it.' And in terms of awards buzz and stuff like that, who knows? None of us knows if that stuff is ever going to happen. But at least people are going to want to see the movie. That's what you hope."A Single Man isn't Moore's only offering on the silver screen right now as her film The Private Lives of Pippa Lee, written and directed by Rebecca Miller, was released last month to theatres.
"That was fun," Julianne says of the experience, "That was a whole different kind of part. Rebecca Miller is a friend of mine. I worked on it for one day. She sent me the script and I said to her, “Can I play that part? I just like it.” So that's how that happened."
Julianne also shared with us what she has coming out next.
I have Atom Egoyan's movie coming out called Chloe and another movie called Shelter, which is supposed to be out in the spring," she reveals, "And then Lisa Cholodenko's movie The Kids Are All Right."
