Julianne Moore says she “hated” shooting an intimate scene with another actor in front of her director husband.
The Oscar-winning star plays a successful philanthropist, wife and mother in movie After The Wedding, with Billy Crudup playing her on-screen partner.
Her real-life husband of almost two decades, Bart Freundlich, directs the film — making a scene where Moore speaks to Crudup in the bath very awkward.
She told ES Magazine she “didn’t like” performing intimate scenes in general, and that her husband also finds it hard to watch.
Of the bath scene, she said: “I hated it! I was like, ‘Why do we have to do this?’ But I don’t really like to do it with anybody.”
Moore, who won a Bafta, a Golden Globe and an Oscar for her 2015 portrayal of a woman with early-onset Alzheimer’s disease in Still Alice, added: “He [Freundlich] doesn’t like seeing me do it in a movie either, but I think it’s not as hard when it’s his movie.”
Moore, 58, has been married to 49-year-old Freundlich for 16 years and they have two children, Caleb, 21, and Liv, 17.
The film is about a charity worker played by Michelle Williams, whose life is turned upside down when she meets Moore’s Theresa Young and asks her to invest in her organisation.
Moore said she was drawn to the part as she wanted to challenge a certain “mythology” about successful women — who she said are often portrayed as not being able to have a good career as well as a family and loving marriage.
“Theresa’s someone I’ve seen a lot in real life,” she said. “I’ve seen women who have built big lives for themselves — they have big careers, and they have families too. But I don’t feel like that representation is out there.
“If you see a successful woman in a movie, she never has a family. Why do we continue to perpetrate that mythology that it’s not possible? That somehow if you’ve managed to become the boss you can’t have any kids too?”
The actress said her mother had told her she would need both love and a career to be happy. “It doesn’t have to be paid work — it just has to be something that you care about … and then you need somebody to love,” she added.
She admitted juggling work and personal life was sometimes a challenge: “You have to invest, if that’s something that you want. Life is finite. This idea that you can do whatever you want at whatever time, it’s not true.”
Following the release of After The Wedding on November 1, Moore stars in The Woman In The Window with Amy Adams. Despite her many work commitments, she said: “It’s my daughter’s last year at home, so I want to be home too.”
Read the full interview in ES Magazine – free every Thursday and Friday.
