Don’t reduce Julianne Moore! In her new cover interview with DuJour magazine, the Carrie actress opens up about her thoughts on marriage, motherhood, aging and plastic surgery — but calls the topics sexist and “reductive.”
“Do we have to talk about parenthood?” she asks the magazine, on newsstands June 11. “I don’t mind, but I do think it’s an extremely profound experience, something that’s difficult to encapsulate in a single interview.”
“Men aren’t asked about age. Men aren’t asked about their children,” the Oscar nominee argues. “Not that these things aren’t important, but I do feel like it becomes reductive when a woman’s life becomes, ‘Talk to me about your kids and how you feel about plastic surgery.'”
The redhead isn’t opposed to answering the questions — she’s 52 — but says, “I just think that it’s boring! . . . Our fear of aging is really a fear of dying; aging is a physical manifestation of decay, and I think that is what’s so upsetting to most people.”
The Game Change star does openly discuss why she eventually decided to marry longtime partner, director Bart Freundlich, in 2003, after having son Caleb, 15, and daughter Liv, 11, together.
“When you say partner, people ask, ‘Do you mean your business partner?’ So we’d be reduced to saying boyfriend and girlfriend, and then there are always issues with hospitals and health insurance, and it just starts to seem silly,” she says. “We are a family. We are emotionally responsible for one another, so we wanted to be legally responsible for one another, too. I think the institution is what you make it.”
When it came to being a mother, however, Moore had no doubts. “Something that I always wanted to do,” she shares. “I didn’t know if I’d get married — I just didn’t innately feel like that was something I could be goal-oriented about — but I knew that I wanted to have children.”