Jose here. Why do I keep forgetting how funny Julianne Moore is? Perhaps because not counting 30 Rock and Maps to the Stars (yes, that is a funny performance) the movies always give us tragic, sad Juli.
Photo credit: Jose Solis
She is the one actress who has perfected the act of onscreen suffering, if you only knew how many times I’ve played that scene with the late night phone call in Far From Heaven to help me cleanse my soul...anyway, once you think of it, outside the movies she always seems to have a huge smile on her face and emanates ginger joy wherever she goes, which wasn’t the exception at a Still Alice press conference I attended yesterday, where she along with Kristen Stewart, Kate Bosworth, author Lisa Genova and co-director Wash Westmoreland discussed the film.
Not one to keep my obsessive fan questions to myself, as Nathaniel has pointed out in the past, I pitched Juli my DVD boxset called “Ill Juli” which would feature Still Alice, The End of the Affair and Safe. She laughed the biggest Moore laugh I’ve had the joy to witness and said “hey, I do comedy too!”
More Juli after the jump...
She composed herself and then explained, “I tend not to think that way. I think that sometimes when you’re looking at somebody’s career and writing about something, you look for threads and you look for references and stuff, but believe it or not, as actors, because we’re freelancers, we literally go from job to job, so you make a movie and then you make the next one and the next one...”
She continued, “especially when you’re referencing something you made ten years ago, I barely remember ten years ago (big Juli laugh), but sometimes people will remember things in my movies and lines they will quote and I’m like ‘what’s that?’”. The Golden Globe winner then shared an anecdote to make her point...
Juli teaches Michael Angarano and Mark Wahlberg
“You know Michael Angarano, right?” she asked, “he’s so great, funny and cute” she continued, “so, we were doing this little comedy called The English Teacher and we had to kiss in it. And so we kissed and he said ‘was that sexy?’ and I was like ‘yeah, Michael, it was great, you were terrific, thanks a lot’ and he then said he wanted to die of embarrassment because he was quoting a line from Boogie Nights and I didn’t know!”
I asked her specifically if Carol White of Safe had informed Alice Howland to which she beautifully replied, “I think that everything you do as a person, everything you do as an actor informs your work, but it’s not really as direct as you might think. It’s just like life, it all accumulates...” and then she gave me that warm smile.
Still Alice opens in theaters Friday.