Two Redheads Click Into a Zoom Meeting

I interviewed Julianne Moore!

One pleasant surprise from my two years of freelance work is how many opportunities I’ve been given to profile some of my favorite celebrities. The very first assignment that landed in my inbox after announcing I was leaving Fashionista was this Porter cover story with Amanda Seyfried!

Whenever an editor reaches out asking if I’d be interested in speaking to this actor or that actress, I think, “Me?!” (Imposter syndrome, baby!) They’re some of my favorite assignments, for all the reasons you’d assume and some you probably wouldn’t.

And I’ve been fortunate that my friends at L’Officiel have trusted me with several profiles over the years, from interviews with up-and-coming actors like India Amarteifio and Ed McVey to a cover story with Sofia Richie Grainge; I even got to moderate a chat between on-screen co-stars and IRL friends Nicholas Hoult and Elle Fanning.

So when my editors (hi Carrie and Caroline!) emailed asking if I had availability to talk with Julianne Moore, it was a no-brainer. I mean, wouldn’t you drop everything to speak with an icon like Julianne?

We Zoomed all the way back in the beginning of October and Julianne was wonderful. The moment she popped on screen, she said, “Oh! You have red hair too!” as though she was truly delighted to commune with a fellow redhead. The focus of our chat was her new movie, The Room Next Door, which is largely a two-hander with fellow icon Tilda Swinton; I asked a lot of questions about her process and what it was like to work with Tilda and Pedro Almodóvar.

(The Room Next Door is the acclaimed Spanish director’s debut English-language feature, and it turns out he likes his actors to be very rehearsed going into filming. I was curious how Julianne and Tilda could maintain a feeling of spontaneity with that much rehearsal, as both performances feel so natural and lived in. You can see what I mean when the movie comes out later this month; it made me want to dig into Almodóvar’s backlog.)

But we also talked about fashion and life and female friendships – all the good stuff. I think this phrase gets overused, but Julianne struck me as a real girls’ girl, and I bet all her friends feel very fortunate to have her in their lives.

The hardest part of any interview is narrowing an hour-plus long chat into a couple thousand words, hoping that you can do the conversation justice and capture the spirit of it in just a little nugget. But I think the end result is a good representation of our meeting.

You can read my interview with Julianne Moore now on L’Officiel, but it’s also the cover of the December 2024 issue internationally (so fancy! I’m translated into Italian!) which means you can also get your hands on it in print. I’m a digital-first girlie at heart, but there’s something so special about seeing my byline in real ink.