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Interview: Julianne Moore

STILL ALICE written and directed by Richard Glatzer and Wash Westmoreland, from the novel by Lisa Genova, with Julianne Moore, Alec Baldwin and Kristen Stewart. 99 minutes. A Mongrel Media release. Opens Friday (January 23). For venues and times, see Movies.


Almost every actor’s resumé is studded with duds, but Julianne Moore’s is remarkably consistent, packed with great movies like Boogie Nights, Far From Heaven and The Hours, to name a few.

That’s because she can sniff out a bad situation pretty early on in the negotiation process.

“Usually I know right away,” she says at a TIFF 2014 roundtable for Still Alice. “When I waffle and have a whole discussion and then say, ‘Let’s have another meeting,’ then I’m in trouble. And I’ve made mistakes that way. I’d get on the set and look back, realizing that I’d had to have five conversations, and I say to myself, ‘Uh-oh.’ 

“With Still Alice, I knew right away. There was no question that I’d make it.”

Good call.

Moore copped her fifth Oscar nomination for her role as a woman with early Alzheimer’s disease. The actor, who’s small in stature but talks in large paragraphs, is disturbingly effective as Alice, a linguistics professor painfully aware that she’s losing her faculties. In what is a completely authentic performance, Moore conveys the growing emptiness inside the head of the once hyper-articulate woman.

She couldn’t have done it without some deep research.

“I knew I couldn’t do the movie without knowing about the disease,” she says. “I started with the head of the Alzheimer Association, who set me up with people across the country with early Alzheimer’s – I’m still in touch with one of them. And I looked at documentaries and did a lot of reading. Everything you see happening to Alice physically is real. The way she keeps pressing her hands together? That’s real.”

The difference between aging and disease.

There’s nothing shocking about Moore giving a great performance. The surprising thing about Still Alice is how moving Alec Baldwin is as Alice’s husband. There’s no evidence of Baldwin’s snark factor, not a smirk in sight. 

“He’s my guy and I love him,” Moore says, her eyes lighting up. 

She’d wanted to work with him for a long time, but he kept refusing all the scripts and finally asked if she had a drama for him. She thought he’d turn down this one because the part was too small, but he accepted.

“Alec has a lot of soul, a lot of vitality, a lot of masculinity. You see how intimate that relationship is and how much he loves her, but he has trouble being with her in the end.”

More on Alec Baldwin.

She’s philosophical about Alice’s predicament, suggesting that, disease or no disease, Alice’s experience mirrors that of every human being,

“Somebody said about life that the only thing we have to do is die. It’s the only requirement. The rest we’ve made up: language, literature, work – it’s all a construct, and we do it because it delights us and we’ve found an economic system within, but at the end of the day….”

On the difference between herself as an actor in Safe and Still Alice.

susanc@nowtoronto.com | @susangcole

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