It’s 9am on the fashionable terrace of the old-school Sunset Tower Hotel in West Hollywood, and Julianne Moore, relaxed and stylish in a particularly furry pair of Rick Owens Birkenstocks, Levi’s jeans, a black cotton top and a pale straw fedora, and who seconds earlier greeted me with a “Hi, I’m Julie”, is hoping we can move to a table inside. The terrace, with its expansive view of the city, is usually one of Los Angeles’ most coveted spots, but not for Moore. “I just can’t see,” she says laughing, shielding her eyes from the intense morning light reflected off of the pink-and-white tiled floor.

For the Academy Award-winning actress, 57, known as much for her fair skin, light-green eyes and flame-red hair as she is for playing a string of alluringly intense and complicated characters, having breakfast al fresco in the middle of a hot Southern California summer – and, later today, being shot by photographer Camilla Åkrans in sunny Topanga Canyon – is something of a challenge. “I’ve worked with Camilla before, so she knows that I need shades and filters if they want me to be able to open my eyes!”

So, what is her secret? Innately cool, youthful and always sexy, Moore is never regarded or treated like a Hollywood elder. And with good reason. Her natural self in person is so uncontrived that it’s immediately clear why she isn’t cast in either ‘age-appropriate’ roles, or seen as too old to play sexy and desirable women. In 2015, she starred in Maggie’s Plan, where she plausibly fought off her fictional love rival, the more-than-20-years-younger Greta Gerwig. Yes, she keeps her hair, makeup and fashion relevant and modern, but there’s more to it; she has the mien of a younger person. When I tentatively suggest that she hasn’t had to relinquish her sex appeal with age, she stops me dead. “Oh my God. I’ve been talking about aging since I was 30,” she says laughing. “Can we just be alive! We’re all aging – children are aging. That’s what life is, and we have to accept that there’s a beginning, a middle and an end. It’s important to remember that there’s a time frame, so we can be awake for it.” But she sounds less exasperated than her words imply and they are delivered with good humor. “Maybe the conversation isn’t so much about aging as it is looking at women in their fifties and sixties in a different way,” she says, “about giving them permission to be sexual beings.” This winter, Moore stars as a sexually free spirit in Sebastián Lelio’s Gloria: “Gloria was so interesting to me because it’s about a woman reimagining her whole life, and she happens to be in her fifties. I want to see a person of this gender, in this age group, as a central character in her own story, as we all are.”

Still, you can hardly blame her frustration. For 28 years, Moore has been asked how it feels to be growing older as an actress, particularly at a time when the general perception is that parts are thin on the ground for women of a certain age. Something which, to be fair, has not unduly affected Moore, who has worked steadily with almost staggering success all the while. (She’s starred in more than 65 movies, garnered four Academy Award nominations, and the aforementioned win for her role in 2014’s Still Alice, as a university linguistics professor battling early-onset Alzheimer’s.) Indeed, most of the parts she has played have been remarkable not for the protagonist’s age, but for their intelligence, political boldness and often-overt sexuality or beauty.

Another frustration for Moore is the way women over 50 are represented so anachronistically and stereotypically on screen – often little more than a mother, a security blanket or a silent supporter. “When every 50-something woman you see on film or television walks into the room and says, ‘I’m so glad you’re home from college!’ and then leaves, it makes you think, ‘Who is that?’ I don’t know anyone like that.” Moore herself isn’t one for retreating to the shadows. Last year, when the #MeToo movement crashed like a wave through the entertainment business, calling out the worst sexual predators in the industry, she was eager to get involved and lend her support. When 38 women, including actresses Selma Blair and Rachel McAdams, called out filmmaker James Toback (who wrote the screenplay for Bugsy, starring Warren Beatty and Annette Bening, which won a Golden Globe in 1992 and was nominated for 10 Academy Awards, including Best Screenplay, and whose most recent film, The Private Life of a Modern Woman, stars Sienna Miller) for lecherous behavior, some tried to discredit them. Not Moore, who came forward with a story about Toback approaching her on the street – twice – in New York when she was in her twenties. (The number of women who have accused Toback of sexual misconduct reached 395 by January 2018.) “One day he stopped me and said, ‘Excuse me! I’m a filmmaker. Are you an actress? I’m casting a film right now. I would love for you to read for me.’ And I said, ‘No, I don’t think so.’ And he kept on, and said, ‘No, I just want you to come back to my apartment and read for me.’ At first, of course, you’re a young actress and you think, ‘Is this really an audition?’ And slowly it became clear to me what was going on.”

Listening to Moore talk about sexual politics in the workplace, and about her relationships with women, both the fictional women she plays on screen and those who she spends time with in real life (her closest friends, she says, are not in the industry), is inspiring, and also galvanizing. “When all the #MeToo stuff started happening, an older gentleman said to me, ‘I’m worried. I’m really worried that people aren’t going to hire women anymore because of this.’ And I went berserk. I said, ‘You know what? We’ll hire each other!’” Even before the current power shift in Hollywood garnered international headlines, she was quietly making meaningful changes in her world. “I thought, I want more female representation.” Though her publicist and agent are men, she has made changes so that the rest of her team is primarily female. And after reading about all-female investment firm Ellevest in a magazine, she transferred her money into their fund. “I just thought, ‘I feel like doing this.’ If you sit around and wait for this stuff to happen by itself, it’s not going to. We have to make daily choices. That’s how it has to happen.”

Moore’s day-to-day life (school drop-offs, a morning yoga class three times a week, lunch with a friend and work calls in the afternoon) is populated almost entirely by women. “There are days when the only men I interact with are my husband and my son,” she says, noting how strange it still is that boardrooms, certain work environments and, yes, the casts of movies, lean so heavily towards men. “There are plenty of women out there. I don’t know what world this is representative of, if there are no women present.”

Travel is another passion. She and Freundlich are on their way to southern India to film scenes for After the Wedding (based on the 2006 Oscar-nominated Danish film of the same name), directed and co-written by Freundlich with Susanne Bier (who penned the original screenplay) and co-starring Moore and Michelle Williams. It’s these joint projects that demonstrate how Moore has made her marriage to Freundlich – who is 10 years her junior – and her family a priority; choosing to work away from home only during summer breaks and taking her family with her whenever possible. The couple have been together for 22 years, but didn’t actually marry until 2003, after they’d had their two children. Moore, who wore a lilac Prada shift dress to their ceremony at their home in the West Village, has said it was her therapist who convinced her to get married, for her children. “The therapist said marriage is really a container for a family, and that made sense to me,” she said in a 2011 interview with The Guardian. “I guess it’s about finding someone you enjoy. You both have to be engaged in each other’s life. Who knows why it works? Spending time together is so important.”

To hear Moore explain it, there is no magic trick to maintaining a successful marriage, or a career, or creating a character that feels authentic, or raising children, or making a difference in the world. It’s about showing up. “It’s about engagement, in your life, in your relationship, in culture and in the world,” she says, circling back to her least favorite topic, which she has spent so much time thinking about that it’s hard to believe she actually dislikes it. “It’s not about staying young. It’s about being alive. Because we have a limited time on earth, let’s try to stay engaged in our lives until we die. That’s it. That’s all we’ve got.”

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