The “most important quality” an actor can learn, according to Julianne Moore
Setting the stage nicely for the constant success and acclaim to come, Julianne Moore had her first major acting award under her belt long before she’d even made her feature-length debut.
The second-ever role of her career saw Moore become the seventh different actor cast as Frannie Hughes in the long-running soap opera As the World Turns, which notched almost 14,000 episodes across a 54-season run. For her efforts, the aspiring star was rewarded with an ‘Outstanding Younger Actress in a Drama Series’ trophy from the Daytime Emmys.
As often tends to be the case for a future legend of the silver screen, Moore debuted on the film side of things in a schlocky horror flick, playing Susan in Tales from the Darkside: The Movie, the spinoff from the anthology TV series of the same name boasting a script co-written by George A. Romero and Malcolm McDowell.
That came in 1990, but by the end of the decade, she was already an Academy Award and Golden Globe-nominated performer thanks to a breakthrough role in Paul Thomas Anderson’s Boogie Nights, which opened the doors for Moore to waste little time in becoming anointed as one of the most consistently acclaimed and reliable stars in the business.
With a ‘Best Actress’ Oscar under her belt from five nominations in total, a Bafta victory from four nods, and two competitive Golden Globes from ten nominations, she’s basically a fixture of awards season at this point in her career. Undoubtedly one of her generation’s finest talents, Moore has her own opinions on what truly constitutes a great actor, and it’s clearly worked wonders given all she’s accomplished.
When asked by The Talks if the ability to focus on being able to act while understanding where the cameras are and how they’re capturing the performance was the most important skill an actor could learn, Moore offered her own two cents on the matter by disagreeing.
“I actually think empathy is the most important quality,” she explained. “You have to try and figure out how people are feeling. Whenever I’m doing research, that’s always the big question. If I can ask somebody, ‘Tell me what it feels like’, I’m interested in that. That’s one of the great things about being an actor, is that we get to dive into that stuff.”
As well as her immersive research, Moore has been known to leave her performance entirely open to interpretation until the moment she steps onto set, sharing how she’d “want to have a sense of who a character is, and then I want to get there and have it happen to me on camera”. Clearly, taking that approach and then making it as empathetic as possible is something that leads to a supremely distinguished career based on her achievements.