Julianne Moore becomes obsessed with illicit sex and infidelity in 'Chloe'

Julianne Moore

In her long and versatile career as an actress, Julianne Moore has portrayed all kinds of characters, including women who live on the edge sexually. She played a porn star (in 1997’s "Boogie Nights") and a woman who commits incest with her son (in 2008’s "Savage Grace"), and Moore has not shied away from doing full-frontal nudity and explicit sex scenes in some of her films.

In 2010’s "Chloe," Moore is gynecologist Catherine Stewart, a Toronto woman who thinks her professor husband, David Stewart (played by Liam Neeson), has been unfaithful, so she hires an escort named Chloe (played by Amanda Seyfried) to pose as a student, seduce David, and report the details to Catherine. As Catherine begins to get caught up in Chloe’s erotic stories about her encounters with David, she pays Chloe to continue her sexual involvement with David — and the two women develop an intimate bond of their own.

I caught up with Moore at the "Chloe" press junket in New York City, where she talked about what she found the most challenging about doing the movie; what it was like to work with Neeson (whose wife, Natasha Richardson, tragically died while he was making "Chloe"); and what her filmmaker husband (and frequent collaborator) Bart Freundlich gets out of her that no other director can.

Julianne Moore in "Chloe"

What’s the significance to you of choosing material that challenges the conventional view of sexuality?

That’s hard! [She laughs.] I don’t particularly choose material based on that tenet. I basically just choose stuff based on story, really. And if the story is compelling, I like behavior, I like relationships. At a certain point in my career, I realized that most of my movies are about relationships — because I do think that at the end of the day, that’s really all that matters: who we know, who we love, who we spend time with.

Zadie Smith said something really interesting in her new book on … What’s it called? ["The Book of Other People"] It’s the one with all of the essays of criticism and stuff like that. In the chapter she did on acting, she said that there was an actor that was dismissed as a family film actor as if it was nothing, as if family wasn’t the major narrative in our lives. I thought, "Wow, that’s fantastic, because that’s how I feel too." You’re family and the people you marry and your friends — that’s the narrative, that’s the big story. So I’m always drawn to material that’s really about relationships.

But you can’t deny that a lot your movie roles are out of the mainstream studio system.

I’ve made 50 something movies. If you took a look at them, there would be some that are outside the mainstream, but then there’d be some that are inside the mainstream. The funny thing about my films is that you can make little piles of them. You could make little piles of the movie that were family movies, you could make a little art movie pile, you could make a little action movie pile, but that’s how they’re divided.

Liam Neeson and Julianne Moore in "Chloe"

Can you talk about working with Liam Neeson and what he brought to "Chloe"?

He’s an amazing actor. He has a unique combination of being somebody who seems extremely emotionally nuanced and also highly masculine at the same time, which is something you really needed for this role. You also need to have his presence there all the time. ["Chloe" screenwriter] Erin [Cressida Wilson] talked about that in one of her interviews, that producers kept pushing her to have more scenes with him talking to friends.

She’s just like, "No, no, no. You can’t do that. He needs to be this kind of loose figure." He’s there and you keep remembering and she keeps yearning for him, but he’s not present in that way. We don’t know what he’s thinking. We don’t know where he is. And Liam is somebody who’s uniquely able to do that because of his vague emotional size.

Amanda Seyfried and Julianne Moore in "Chloe"

And how was Amanda Seyfried?

Amanda, too, was very lovely. The thing that impressed me the most about her was how incredibly receptive she was and present as an actor. She never got ahead of the material. Everything we had to do was very nuanced and slow. It’s about people kind of building trust in each other and allowing each other to take this pretty far, but take it one step at a time, and she never got ahead of the material, ever. She was always very, very present, like I said, very receptive, very much available too, which was quite impressive to me.

"Chloe" screenwriter Erin Cressida Wilson said that she wrote Catherine with you in mind to play the role. Did you know that before officially signing on to do "Chloe"?

I had no idea. She told me that much later. She told me that on the set. I was like, "What? Really?"

Julianne Moore and Amanda Seyfried in "Chloe"

When filming the sex scene with Amanda Seyfried, was there anything you did differently to prepare, compared to other sex scenes you’ve done in the past?

There was nothing different that I did to prepare than I do to prepare for any other intimate scene, if that’s what your question is. Do you mean was it different because it was a girl?

Well, not necessarily.

Whenever you have an intimate scene with somebody, you’re very, very prepared no matter what it is. Everyone knows exactly what’s happening. It’s usually very choreographed. If you’re lucky, you’re very familiar with the actor by the time you shoot it. Amanda and I had been working together and had done most of our stuff at that point, so we were comfortable with each other. Atom [Egoyan, the director of "Chloe"] was very particular about how he’s going to shoot it. We knew where the camera was, we knew how many shots there were, we knew how many setups there were. So that’s kind of what you do to prepare, just to make yourself comfortable.

Liam Neeson and Julianne Moore in "Chloe"

What was it about Catherine that you identified most with as a wife and mother?

I identified with the fact that she’s been married for a long time. That’s me. So many movies are about getting married. Like, "Oh, I’m going to meet this guy! And oh, is he going to ask me to marry him? And oh, he did! We got married! The end!" In life, marriage is long and complicated. And that’s just the beginning, and after a while you barely remember the beginning. Like, "When did we meet? Was it 14, 15 years ago?" You don’t know anymore and that’s the least of it.

The idea that this is a woman who is in this middle of her life and in the middle of her marriage and suddenly found herself struggling with it, thinking about it, it was really novel. I just don’t think you see it very often, and I was very compelled by it. Liam and I have this scene in the car where I’m asking him some questions and it quickly escalates into a fight. And Atom hadn’t envisioned it that way, and neither had we and it just turned into a fight. And he was like, "That’s was interesting."

And we both were really pleased with it because … nobody means to fight. You don’t mean to, you do it, you say something and suddenly you’ve fought and then you’ve ruined the weekend and that’s it and you’re like, "How do I recover from this fight? How to we do it?" The fact that that dynamic was so present that these people were people who wanted to be together, wanted their marriage to work, but were stuck was, I thought, very compelling.

Your kids are still young, but did you get any insight into dealing with a child who’s old enough to move out of the home, since Catherine dealing with that with her only child?

[Catherine] complains about her son, but she’s not allowing him to grow up. She’s trying to put him back into a child box when he’s in a teenage place. So I wouldn’t say, "Oh look, he’s just a typical teenager." I would say, "Well, there are two sides to it, and I don’t think she’s particularly allowing him to be who he is."

Amanda Seyfried, director Atom Egoyan and Julianne Moore on the set of "Chloe"

What was your fascination with Atom’s direction, compared to other directors that you’ve worked with in the past?

I think that he particularly is someone who’s really interested in the subtlety of human behavior, and he’s also aware that just how we communicate and the fact that what we’re saying, the language we’re using is not always what we’re communicating. It sounds simplistic to say it, but so often in film everyone has the expectation that what an actor is saying is what they mean, when in fact, life is rarely that way.

Did you see "The September Issue"? Well, I mean, my God! The behavior in that was phenomenal. I was so excited to see it because you don’t get to see that kind of tension and that kind of sublimated rage and desire and all this kind of stuff [she whispers] where everybody’s talking like this.

I just saw a play recently and everyone was yelling and my friend, who’s not an actor, said to me, "I never yelled that much in my life." I said, "I know. People don’t yell." People really don’t. But Atom is someone who kind of understands that a lot can transpire very little and what you’re saying does not always correspond with what you mean. So all of that complexity, he’s a master of.

Julianne Moore and Amanda Seyfried in "Chloe"

What was the most challenging aspect of your role in "Chloe"?

Keeping it within the balance of normal behavior. If you try to one line this movie, it’s about a woman who hires a prostitute to follow her husband to find out if he’s cheating. It’s like [she says in a sarcastic voice] ,"Oh yeah, that happens all the time." When you do that, you get outside of it and then it stops being meaningful. You have to be inside of Catherine all the time, so that every time she meets [Chloe] and she goes, "OK, we’re going to do this one more time. OK, one more time." Each step feels like tragedy inevitable. You can see it, you know it’s coming, but you know she has to take this. So that’s the most challenging thing to keep in line.

You always have lots of projects in the works. What do you have coming up that you’re excited about the most?

Well, if you’re reading IMDb, half of it’s made up. You can’t trust it or Wikipedia, which is just lies, lies! I have this movie and I have Lisa Cholodenko’s movie "The Kids Are All Right." I’m finishing "30 Rock," and then I’m going to do my husband’s movie this summer ["Backwoods"], and then maybe something else that I haven’t finished negotiating.

Annette Bening and Julianne Moore in "The Kids Are All Right"

You were on the soap opera "As the World Turns" from 1985 to 1987, and you signed on to tape a guest appearance on the series before it goes off the air this year. What can you say about that experience of going back to "As the World Turns"?

I did it already. I did it; we shot it. I don’t know when it airs. They asked me to come back because they’re going off the air. It was nice to be able to go back, and they’re people that I cared about on that show. And to say hello and goodbye. It was nice to see them.

Has the dynamic between you and your husband (filmmaker Bart Freundlich) changed at all, in terms of when he writes and directs something? Does he always have you in mind if there’s a leading lady in his film?

I don’t know. It’s interesting because he was going to do this one project ["Backwoods"] at a different time and when I was not going to be able to do it, I was going to be working on something else, and then his time ended up changing and I was like, "Well, why don’t we do it when it’s warm, in the summer and then we can all do it together?" So I think that we still think of things that way, but I also don’t feel like he has to do it. He doesn’t have to think of me for stuff, but it’s also nice to work together. So no, it probably hasn’t changed much.

Julianne Moore and Bart Freundlich at the New York City premiere of "The Private Lives of Pippa Lee"

What does he get out of you that no other director can?

Accessibility! [She laughs.] He has access. I know this because I’m married to a director, and sometimes it’s impossible to get to actors. They always feel like there’s all these steps to take, because f you can get to somebody and half of the time actors will do it. They’ll go, "Yeah, sure. I’ll do it." It’s just hard to get to them.

Catherine Stewart feels insecure about her looks and insecure about getting older, and a lot of famous actresses feel that way, too. Can you talk about those parallels?

I think the reason Catherine feels that way is because she feels fragile in her own life and in her own marriage. She feels like he doesn’t see her anymore, so that makes kind of makes all these other women loom [large] around her — that fragility, that idea that she’s disappearing, that literally she can’t see her in front of him. So I think that when people really do feel that way, I think they can really feel off-balance and threatened and scared and stuff. But when you feel loved and seen, I think that [insecurity] is not something that you necessarily feel.

Photo credits: Photos #1, 10: Getty Images. Photo #9: Focus Features. All other photos: Sony Pictures Classics.