Julianne Moore and Eddie Redmayne in a scene from “Savage Grace.”
Julianne Moore has already tackled drug addicts, tough cookies, sexual free spirits and desperate housewives.
Now she takes on Barbara Baekeland, a character so over-the-top nuts that, were she to show up on Wisteria Lane, she’d probably cause Susan, Bree and Gabrielle to lock their doors.
Barbara - around whom the film “Savage Grace” revolves - was a real desperate housewife. Unhappily married to Brooks Baekeland, the heir of the Baekeland plastics fortune, she schemed, preened, traveled the world and bore a son, Tony, to whom she was rather unusually devoted.
Barbara ended up stabbed to death in 1972 at Tony’s hands. When the police arrived to arrest him, her son was ordering Chinese takeout.
“She was boundary-less,” Moore says of her character. “Barbara needed to be looked at and appraised, to be the central figure, and yet she was not without her own degree of interest and compassion.”
By most accounts, Barbara was often the life of a party, but could just as often leave members of the Eastern seaboard upper crust shaking their heads the moment the door shut behind her. She slept with her son, ostensibly to “cure” his homosexuality.
“The most difficult thing was to bring her to a completely human scale,” says Moore. “This person who had done these things that were completely out of control, maybe even monstrous. How do you bring that into a room? That was always the challenge with her.”
Moore’s analysis continues.
“Once Brooks left her, Barbara and Tony’s relationship became kind of brutal and hypersexual and incredibly interdependent,” Moore says. “She was manic depressive, he was schizophrenic. Had Brooks stayed, the feeling is it wouldn’t have been that bad, although it wouldn’t have been great.”
Howard Rodman’s script landed on Moore’s desk nearly six years ago, shortly after the birth of daughter Liv, her second child with director Bart Freundlich (”The Myth of Fingerprints”). Moore immediately told producer Christine Vachon of her interest, but “Savage Grace” - which opened in limited release this weekend - took several years to get financing.
“It was a true story, and it really blew me away,” the actress says. “It’s an unbelievable, almost Greek tragedy, endlessly interesting.”
Barbara Baekeland, like Moore, was a redhead, and the physical resemblance between the two women is notable, but that’s hardly the reason that producers and director Tom Kalin went after Moore for “Savage.”
“She’s incredibly gifted at finding moments of behavior that express and suggest the deeper psychological contours of a character,” says Kalin, who met Moore through her “Far From Heaven” director, Todd Haynes.
“She’s intuitive, not intellectual - though I couldn’t think of a more bright person - and she’s brave enough not to judge any of the characters she’s playing.”
That quality is probably to her benefit. Moore, as previously noted, has played some rather extreme types before (including her characters in “Magnolia,” “Freedomland” and “The Hours”). How deeply, then, does the four-time Oscar-nominated actress crawl into someone like “boundary-less” Barbara’s skin?
“Not that deeply,” says Moore, 47, with a laugh. “I have a family and two small children. When I go home with the kids, that’s how it is. I don’t have the luxury of dragging (my character) around. That’s not how I work, anyway.
“I always say to people: It isn’t difficult. I’m just pretending. It’s great that I have the ability to do that in my work, to go in there and explore the vastness of human behavior. Then I’m done.”
Barbara is Moore’s first leading role since the 2006 “Freedomland.” After shooting “Savage Grace,” she made her Broadway debut in David Hare’s new play, “The Vertical Hour,” for director Sam Mendes in late 2006 and early 2007.
The reviews - of both the play and Moore’s performance - were tepid, and the actress isn’t eager to return to the stage.
“With the scale I like to work in, I prefer film. It’s just more suited to what I want to do,” Moore says. “I don’t fundamentally like performing. Being on stage didn’t feel right to me. It felt too much like being looked at rather than being inside the story.”
The daughter of a military judge and a social worker, Moore worked off-Broadway and in regional theater before landing the role of Frannie Hughes on the soap “As the World Turns.”
Film audiences first took major notice when Moore, then 33, went bottomless as part of the ensemble of Robert Altman’s “Short Cuts” in 1993. It was one of four films Moore made that year. Her work on Andre Gregory’s adaptation of Chekhov’s “Uncle Vanya” culminated in the Louis Malle-directed “Vanya on 42nd Street.”
Along the way, there have been the bigger action pictures (”The Fugitive,” “The Lost World”) and her much-publicized foray into the Hannibal Lecter series with “Hannibal.” She earned a pair of Oscar nominations in 2002 for “Far From Heaven” and “The Hours.”
Earlier this summer, Moore was in Cannes promoting the upcoming film “Blindness” based on the novel by Jose Saramago and directed by Fernando Meirelles.
She has appeared in three of her husband’s movies, and their children - ages 10 and 6 - have had cameos in “Trust the Man” and “Blindness.”
“They come on set with me, and I think they know about acting and stories and film, but they don’t really have any interest,” Moore says. “They’re very interested in what their parents do, period, and I think that’s a healthy way to be.”
They haven’t seen most of their mom’s movies. Unlike Barbara Baekeland, the Freundlich/Moore household has boundaries.
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