With a decades-long career in Hollywood under her belt, Julianne Moore has a lot to say.
The 55-year-old Oscar winner has portrayed seemingly every kind of woman on the silver screen, from a 1950s California housewife in an unhappy marriage to a linguistics professor facing early on-set Alzheimers disease. In her newest role in the documentary-inspired drama Freeheld, Moore immersed herself in a battle familiar to the LGBT community as she portrayed police office Laurel Hester, a woman on her deathbed fighting to transfer her benefits to her domestic partner, portrayed by Ellen Page. To recreate the struggle of this famous woman, the actress drew on the real-life experiences of her co-star, who famously came out as gay in 2014. She discussed all that and more for the March issue of Marie Claire UK.
"Ellen was miserable," Moore said in an interview with the magazine. "She talked to me very frankly about her own experience—what it felt like, about the nature of the discomfort. A lot of people I know came out a long time ago. None of my friends were celebrities when they came out; they were college students. So here I was talking to this very young woman, who had recently come out, about experiences that were very, very fresh, so it was a different kind of conversation."
Moore witnessed firsthand the devastation of the AIDS epidemic as a young unknown actress living in the early 1980s.
"I was 23 years old, and people started dying," she recollected. "The first person I knew went away to Mexico on vacation, came home and died—he said he had the Mexican flu. People just kept dying. And these were my friends. It was happening in the actor community, and it was devastating. So I think that made me politically aware."
Having collected many years in the industry, she's also very much aware of a problem that continues to plague modern Hollywood.
"It's very difficult to find parts, no matter how old you are, no matter where you are and whether you're a man or a woman," she said. "The movie industry is not in the business of finding good roles for actors or actresses; it is in the business of creating films that will make as much money as possible."
While a hard-working professional, the Still Alice star always puts her two children first.
"At night, I won't answer work emails, or the phone, unless there is an emergency," she revealed. "If I have to read scripts, or have a meeting, or do an interview, I do it during the school day. I don't think I've ever given an interview within the school hours, just because I want to be home when my kids are home. I want to have dinner with them."
To read the feature in full, see the March issue of Marie Claire out today. It is also available as a digital edition through Apple Newsstand.