The actress and gun control campaigner hadn’t taken a role that involved aiming a weapon for 15 years — until now. The star of Apple TV’s Sharper talks honestly about juggling life as a mother and an activist.
Are film stars who dabble in political issues helping their cause or simply sanctimonious irritants? The way Julianne Moore sees it, actors do not get into activism because they are famous — rather, they speak out because they are human beings. The Oscar-winner, who has lovely homes in New York City and the Hamptons, has long been a figurehead for Hollywood’s liberal elite, but why should that disqualify her from seeking change?
“I don’t think it has anything to do with being an actor,” she interrupts, when I say her activism may stem from being famous. “I think about it in terms of being a citizen of my country. If there is something you care about you feel you need to take action. So everything I’ve done politically has been about how I feel personally. A job is a job, but as a citizen you have a responsibility to participate in a community.”
She says all this with a smile. Casual, with long dark-red hair flowing over a plain black T-shirt. She is in the kitchen of the Notting Hill flat she is staying in while filming a TV show set in the 1600s. “A crazy Jacobean TV show — just what the world is clamouring for,” she deadpans. The actress, 62, is deep into that irreverent, relaxed stage of her 40-year-old career, when she doesn’t have to worry about speaking her mind.
A fading porn star in Boogie Nights; a 1950s housewife in crisis in Far from Heaven; a professor with dementia in Still Alice — she achieved lift-off in the 1990s when her start as an actress coincided with a boom in US indie cinema, and there were so many great roles. Now she is free to pick whatever she wants, and spend time off set on what she thinks matters most.
Take guns. We met in January, when in that month 1,214 gun deaths were recorded in the US. Moore is a founder of the neighbourhood pressure group Everytown for Gun Safety, which boasts “10 million everyday Americans who have come together to make their own communities safer”. It has the backing of stars from Jennifer Lawrence to Harry Styles, who pledged $1 million last year.
Moore was spurred into action after the Sandy Hook massacre in December 2012, in which 20 children, most aged only six or seven, were slaughtered at school. Moore remembers decorating the Christmas tree with her daughter, Liv, then ten, who asked: “Mommy, did some kids get shot today?” Liv is 20 now, while her son, Caleb, is 25. It was her children’s reaction to Sandy Hook that sparked Moore’s campaign for gun control. A decade later it occupies her more than ever.
“I’ve been very involved in the gun safety movement because I realised I wasn’t keeping my children safe if I didn’t do my part to change the legislation,” she tells me. “I thought, ‘I’m not being the kind of parent I want to be.’ I thought that if something happened to them it would be my fault.”
Moore, when she talks like this, comes across as your average terrified American parent. But the issue of guns is tricky for a Hollywood actor, and I think Moore recognises the possible hypocrisy. After all, she’s in a business worth billions in which killing with guns is entertainment.
A few years ago the actor Ethan Hawke admitted that he and his peers get paid “exponentially more” to fire guns in movies, simply because violent films tend to make more money.
So how does Moore measure up — how many times has she used a gun on screen? According to the Internet Movie Firearms Database (IMFDb) she has not used a weapon on screen since the 2007 thriller Next.
Was that a conscious decision? “Yes,” she says. “It’s not something I feel drawn to at all. I don’t find it appealing.” That said, it is not like she refuses to act in films with guns. She was in Kingsman: The Golden Circle from 2017, where the body count kept climbing.
Moore is clear that Hollywood isn’t to blame for the US death toll. “It’s really important when you talk about gun safety and people blame entertainment to realise that the entire world consumes the same entertainment as the US, but the US has easy access to weapons. So I am not a big fan of violent movies, but I also don’t blame gun violence on entertainment.”
So what about her new film, Sharper, when she is back with a gun for the first time in 15 years? The answer, without giving anything away, is that Moore’s gun use in Sharper is far from gung-ho. The film almost feels like a moral tale, given how badly everything goes when it is fired.
So it is still possible to combine activism and acting.
Sharper is the sort of grown-up thriller with a twisty plot that Hollywood made in the 1990s before blockbusters ate cinema. Think Robin Hood in modern-day Manhattan, where a bunch of con artists take on the wealthy. It brings to mind what Joan Collins wrote in The Spectator about a recent trip to the cinema to see the unchallenging action romp Plane. “It’s not an Oscar contender by any stretch,” she wrote, “mostly because it was watchable, satisfying and brief.”
Moore agrees with all this. “I know,” she says with a sigh about the dearth of the slick, smart movies that you want to watch with a Friday night takeaway. Sharper is pure entertainment but, Moore says, it’s also a story with intellect. “Rather than, you know, ‘There is a ticking time bomb at the centre of the city! How will we get there?’” she scoffs. “People are the motivators here.”
And one motivation is, clearly, to unsettle the super-rich, the so-called 1 per cent — a theme that Hollywood seems obsessed with thanks to Succession, The White Lotus and The Menu. When I ask where a very successful actor sits in the pecking order of the multimillionaires Sharper pokes fun at, Moore simply explains that her city is a small island, and everyone is rather “jumbled up”.
Yet she is invigorated by the subject of money. Indeed she rolls straight from Sharper into an analysis of the socioeconomic make-up of America since the banking deregulations of 1980. Moore was born in north Virginia in 1960 and her parents, who married young, taught her the value of education. Her father, Peter, was in the army, so the family moved around and she saw a lot of America. And when the children were older Peter went to law school and her mother obtained two master’s degrees. Back then, Moore says, “you could lead a decent life, contribute to the world and get enough money to take care of your family. And then, suddenly, the banks were deregulated. Everything changed. It was not enough to be a doctor or a lawyer . . . people were making massive amounts of money. Massive! All that anybody seemed to care about, or chase, was money.”
Sharper deals with this greed — which is why Moore liked it. Over her long career she has barely touched sci-fi and fantasy films. Yes, there was The Hunger Games, but she took that part only for her children. She prefers roles that are down to earth, rooted in the here and now. “I’m attracted to people’s behaviour,” she says. “It is compelling, complicated.”
It helps, I suggest, that Hollywood has changed since Moore started and offers older women the hefty, tough roles the actress revels in. Why did the shift happen?
“Well, we’re all the heroes of our own story, right?” she says. “Wherever you are in life, seven or seventy, you’re the hero, not the sidekick.”
She is funny when she talks about her past. “You see a clip on TV and go, ‘Is that me?’” she says. “I have no relationship to that person. That was so long ago. What’s weird about what actors do is that it is frozen — this image of ourselves is suspended in time.”
Moore has always been good at compartmentalising her life. Some of her roles were tough to play, but when Liv and Caleb were young she would remind herself that, at home, she had to be a parent. Again, she insists, this is not an “actor thing” but normal. She talks of a “low hum” that stays with us if something does not go well at work, but then you have to figure out how to make it stop. “Things will seep into my life,” she says, “but they don’t invade.”
Then, though, something did invade her life, causes she could not ignore. Guns, for one. And the struggle for abortion rights after the US Supreme Court’s repeal of Roe v Wade is another. These fights continue, and I wonder if campaigning — not the day job — will end up as her life’s work.
Sharper is on Apple TV+ from February 17
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Written by: Jonathan Dean
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