On this Thursday’s episode of The Run-Through, the great Julianne Moore chats with Chloe Malle and Taylor Antrim about her two buzzy latest projects, Netflix’s Sirens (co-starring Meghann Fahy and Milly Alcock) and the Apple TV+ thriller Echo Valley (with Sydney Sweeney), as well as her recent jaunt to Cannes—where she gave the world a thrilling first glimpse of Bottega Veneta’s new era. (Also on this episode? Chioma Nnadi takes us behind the scenes of her shoot with British Vogue’s latest cover star, Dua Lipa!)
Read excerpts from the conversation—which also covers, in no particular order, Moore’s fondness for birds and Diet Pepsi; her memories of working with Chloe’s father, Louis Malle, on Vanya on 42nd Street; her “hollow bones”; letting her 23-year-old daughter borrow her things; and so much more—below.
Chloe Malle: I have to tell you that all of the ladies and gentlemen in the Vogue office are extremely invested in Sirens.
Julianne Moore: I have to say, this has been—I texted Meghann [Fahy] today saying, like, Can you believe this? Like, everybody’s seen it. It’s nuts.
CM: Taylor and I were sort of prepping for this interview and Taylor sits in front of Anna’s office, and one of Anna’s assistants goes, “Stop! I’m on the last episode! You’re saying too much!”
Taylor Antrim: Because, I confess, I haven’t finished it. So I was getting Chloe to sort of fill me in.
CM: I find the last episode quite Shakespearean. It’s really amazing.
JM: It’s a wonderful reveal.
CM: Did you gasp when you first read it? Did you anticipate that kind of reveal for Michaela?
JM: I knew it was coming. The thing about this kind of television, too, is that they have an outline.They know how it’s gonna end, but they don’t know exactly how, so we had the first couple of scripts, and then Molly [Smith Metzler] was sort of developing things as we worked. And so there were things that were changing a little bit. But I knew what the final moment was gonna be.
CM: I wonder if there was any inspiration for Michaela. ’cause for me, it sort of felt almost Daphne du Maurier-esque; there was an All About Eve thing; like, there were lots of different strains of anti-heroines.
JM: She is definitely a constructed personality. That was what was fun about it. But I think about what she’s projecting, what she cares about, and what her position is, and so you learn later on that her position is pretty tenuous, so that makes her projection that much more forceful.
CM: Had you ever worked with falcons before?
JM: I love birds. I’m a bird person. I had an African grey at one point. I like handling birds and I’ve handled them quite a bit.
CM: They got very lucky! Not everyone can say they handle birds.
JM: I didn’t lead with that. But I’ve never handled falcons before, so that was fun. And they were sweet. I don’t know if you saw the third episode, but there’s a moment when I’m talking to Simone [Milly Alcock] and I have my hand up. I’ve been talking to the bird, who was a really young, very sweet bird who was kind of nervous—it didn’t even wanna take food from me, which is a little piece of raw chicken. But I had been talking to him and stroking him and just kinda sitting there. And in the middle of the scene, he hopped on my hand—
CM: [Gasps.] I thought you were gonna say, “He bit off my finger.”
JM: No, no, no. He just hopped on. And I was like, This better be in the show.
CM: We’ve had a lot of discussion in our office about the clothes on Sirens. One of our writers spoke to the costume designer about nailing the sort of exaggerated, almost camp preppy aesthetic. But I feel like Michaela’s clothes were the only wardrobe one really coveted from the show.
JM: [Costume designer] Caroline Duncan and I worked on that pretty closely. It’s like [Michaela] has a higher fashion pitch than everybody else. She’s the queen bee, so she wants to differentiate herself and signal her power. So we talked about keeping her in ivories a lot, cream colors. And stuff that’s not particularly practical.
CM: Did you keep anything?
JM: I did. The outfit that I kept was the one that I wore at the very end of the show, when she’s on the ferry, because I was like, That, I’ll wear. That was a suede Khaite jacket. I loved it. And a pair of The Row jeans that I loved, and this great sweater.
CM: Do you often, or ever, bring any of your own clothes onto set?
JM: I try to avoid it. Sometimes I bring shoes ’cause I’m really particular about how my shoes fit and whether or not I can walk in them. But, you know, costumes get dirty, you get makeup on them, you’re kind of in dirty places. And so if you have something really nice, you don’t wanna bring it to work. [Laughs.]
CM: I wanna know if Michaela’s life at Cliff House has any correlation to Julianne’s life in Montauk.
JM: Oh, no, no. As a matter of fact, I went to the beverage store in Montauk last weekend to get my case of lemon LaCroix and my mini Diet Pepsis and stuff, and the woman that I know from the beverage store was saying, “I really love that show, but wow, she’s not like you at all.” I was like, I don’t think Kiki buys her own mini Diet Pepsis.
TA: You started by saying that you notice that everyone’s watching this show. You’ve been in a lot of big, blockbuster-y movies that have big premieres and box office numbers, and now we’re in a new era where something like Sirens starts to dominate the conversation. What are your thoughts on that?
JM: Tech has changed everything for us. It has changed the way we consume entertainment, the way we communicate, our sense of the world and its size. [A movie or show] kind of permeates culture differently. And it happens really, really fast. That’s what I notice. ’Cause even if you were in a blockbuster movie when they were thriving, you felt it, but it was a longer build.
TA: Yeah. I just wonder, from your end, if you feel the same sort of gratification with these projects that percolate differently throughout the culture.
JM: I do think that as an actor, I’ve always had to do my work for myself because I love it. I really enjoy it and I can’t have any expectation about how it’s going to be received in the world and who’s gonna watch it, ’cause I can’t control that. So there’s things that I’ve had great experiences with that have maybe not been consumed until, like, 10 years later. [Vanya on 42nd Street], for example, is something that was really important to me. It was a theater project that took five years and then we shot it in two weeks, and then as the years go on, it’s just become this classic people refer to.
CM: Thanks to Criteron, in large part. It wasn’t available for a long time. It was a production of Vanya at the sort of derelict Victory Theater in the early ’90s. André Gregory was having voluntary workshops that were over years, but he would only invite, like, four to five people. And it became this must-see thing because you couldn’t see it…so, sort of the opposite of streaming. And then Louis filmed it and people still really couldn’t see it. My family all think very fondly of that production, ’cause that was his last film.
JM: It was great. It was a great experience.
CM: On the way home last night, I walked by everyone breaking down the red carpet for Echo Valley. That’s the next thing that’s coming out into the world. And I loved your velvet Alaïa dress. How did you pick that?
JM: Well, they wanted to make me a custom dress, and I was really grateful to Pieter [Mulier] and very, very excited. Then I was in Cannes for the Kering dinner and they came for a fitting and put it on me and I was like, “This is amazing.” They made it, like, lickety split.
TA: [Watching] Echo Valley, I just thought to myself, I wish they made more movies like this. Twenty years ago, there were more fun, twisty thrillers, and now it feels like if it’s not robots and dinosaurs and superheroes, it’s gotta be a tiny indie. This movie was in the middle and I was so appreciative of that.
JM: This also feels like a throwback to the thrillers of the ’40s—those traditional, interesting, surprising, mysterious “women’s pictures” that they used to make, where there was a woman at the center of a narrative, and it was often a domestic narrative, with a partner or with a child, and then it would start to unfold. [In Echo Valley], this is a woman who’s really trying to hold her life together after the death of her spouse and trying to hold onto the farm that she maintains by herself, and has a daughter who’s struggling with addiction. So she has all of these enormously painful things that are happening, but she’s ordinary. And in the face of all this adversity, she ends up being really, really surprising. It’s a lot of fun.
CM: I wanna hear about the horses in Echo Valley. I like that you were a bird person; are you also an equestrian?
JM: I rode a little bit, but not for very long. I like all of the things on a set that are really unpredictable—babies are fun. I love the unpredictability of it and I like the aliveness of it. And so it’s the same way when you work with a horse or a bird, they’re really alive, you know?
CM: I thought it was very charming that Sydney Sweeney said she dreams of being you in an interview. And Meghann Fahy, in her Beauty Secrets, was like, “Well, I watched one of these where Julianne Moore said that she pats oil onto her skin, so now I do that every night.”
JM: I think I did it because the makeup artist I was working with told me, “Do it like this.” We’re all learning from others.
CM: Are they asking advice about anything? Because a lot of these women are starting in their careers and really launching onto the main stage.
JM: They’re great. They’re just just wonderful actors and great people and great partners. And one of the things that I think is really interesting about what we do—and I learned this as a young person and I’m experiencing it as an older person—is that whoever you meet on a set, you meet as a peer. People talk a lot about, “Who’d you learn from?” But there’s not a lot of time, and I also think it’s a very high bar to entry. So when somebody gets there, they’re expected to bring it.
You might work with an actor—well, back to Vanya again, George Gaynes, who was in his 70s at the time, and I was playing his wife when I was 27. It was so interesting to be in a romantic relationship with an actor who was much, much older than me. But you approach it as peers. [And now] it’s exciting to work with people who are new. It’s exciting to work with people who are that emotionally available and that imaginative. It was a great experience.
CM: Is there any advice you would give your 25-year-old self?
JM: Calm down. Just calm down for one second.
TA: My kids are 13 and 10, and empty-nesting is not here, but it’s sort of on the horizon. So, what can you tell me about it? I’m looking for wisdom and guidance.
JM: What I can tell you is that it’s another developmental stage. That’s what’s surprising. You think that in your life you’re like, I understand change. You don’t. It’s that thing that they always tell you: nothing is constant except for change. And that’s why we keep looking at people’s routines, ’cause you’re like, I need to know what to hang to. But there’s never anything. That’s the problem.
TA: One never likes to play favorites on microphones, but I was just thinking of all these amazing directors you’ve worked with, from Todd Haynes to Paul Thomas Anderson, Robert Altman, Tom Ford.
JM: You want me to rank them, right?
CM: From one to five.
TA: I wondered if there was like a moment of uncommon chemistry with one of these directors. Is there someone that you just were like, This person and I speak the same language.
JM: Well, Todd and I are really similar. We’re the same age. We have not dissimilar backgrounds: Our parents were very, very young when they got married, we’re both the oldest of three, we have a similar energy. I feel like we sort of recognize each other, see each other, in that way. He tells a lot of stories about people in domestic situations—the drama of that kind of life. So I think we both understand that.
CM: I’m shifting gears to another excitement in the Vogue office, which was your debut of Louise Trotter’s Bottega at Cannes.
JM: I was gonna say, I hope this is gonna be about clothes ’cause I’m ready. How great is Louise, right? I met her at the Dia:Beacon event and we were talking about how not only is she moving to Milan, but she has to get three kids into school in Milan while she starts this gigantic job.
CM: Oh, that’s a nightmare.
JM: The dress was so chic, so special. It’s very much in line with the house and with her sensibility and it fit me beautifully. I love the long, kind of crazy tassel. It was really an honor.
This interview has been edited and condensed for length and clarity.
