Moore says ‘Kids' script pushes her performance

Over the years, Julianne Moore has carved out one of the most fearless careers in the business, using that breathy voice and delicate beauty to make otherwise one-dimensional characters deeply tragic, frighteningly vulnerable and even funny in complicated ways.

She first caught the critics’ attention as the tiny-voiced housewife plagued by her modern life in Todd Haynes’ chilling 1995 drama “Safe.” And during the next decade, she earned four Oscar nominations for a series of unforgettable women including “Boogie Nights’” Amber Waves, the porn star with a mommy complex, the lovelorn adulteress in “End of the Affair,” and a pair of disintegrating 1950s housewives, one in “Far From Heaven” and the other in “The Hours.”

After a Golden Globe-nominated performance as the dimming 1960s party girl in last year’s “A Single Man,” Moore went on to hold her own as Alec Baldwin’s working-class Boston sweetheart on NBC’s “30 Rock.”

In “Kids,” Moore personifies a new genre of mid-life crisis -- that of a lesbian free spirit who’s wavering sense of self lands her in bed with a man. Here, Moore, 49, talks about her vigorous sex scenes with Mark Ruffalo, mimicking “Kids” director Lisa Cholodenko for the role and how being an Army brat helped her as an actor.

Q: What attracted you to this role?

MOORE: It’s a wonderfully nuanced portrayal of a long term relationship and a family. But it’s also really entertaining and really funny. I really like language and people always say, ‘How did somebody get this performance?’ You don’t get the performance without the script. When you have that, you’re able to deliver something. When you don’t, you can’t. Or I can’t anyway. I don’t think I’m that forceful a personality. … I loved the language and the specificity of it. I particularly liked Jules’ inability to articulate. … Her great talent is with people. She’s got a warmth and ability to connect that’s really admirable.

Q: How did you find a way into this character? When did it start to click for you?

MOORE: I don’t think it ever clicked. I think that was the interesting thing about playing Jules for me. I knew she was there. She was in the script and she was sort of in my head. In a weird kind of way, Jules doesn’t see things, just feels things. So it’s almost like having your head down and doing everything like this [mimes wearing blinders]. Sometimes I would feel like, What happened? I knew it was there. I didn’t know if I was achieving it or not. I really liked her so much. I really loved the fact that Lisa [Cholodenko] was like, ‘I really like that California-y, lesbian, New Age thing you’re doing [with your voice]. And I said, ‘Really, Lisa? You like that?’ Cause it’s Lisa’s voice. So there were things that were really specific that I liked about her. She wears all these old T-shirts. A lot of the T-shirts actually belonged to Lisa or her partner Wendy [Melvoin].

Q: What was it like doing those sex scenes with Mark Ruffalo?

MOORE: It was great because we were friends. Mark and I spent an entire movie literally holding hands because [in 2008’s “Blindness”], he’s blind and I’m leading him around. … Because [in “Kids”] we had no time, we had three days for the entire sub-plot, the fact that we knew each other really well was really great. It was incredibly helpful. There is stuff I don’t actually remember doing. When I saw the movie, I was like, ‘Did we do that?’ There’s a lot of moving around. I don’t remember it being that physical. But we wanted it to be funny and we really relied on each other.

Q: You can project such believable fragility. Is that something you see in yourself?

MOORE: Our job is about allowing a certain kind of emotional accessibility on screen. That’s how people enter a film. You enter a film through a character. I think people come to the movies to see themselves. They don’t come to see us. So generally when someone is responding to something in an actor it’s something they’re relating to in that character, they’ve got an emotional highway into them. … A lot of the movies I’ve done are not very plot-oriented. A lot of them are kind of about what a human experience is, in a relationship or a family or some kind of a trauma. In those, it’s the emotional accessibility that matters most. My characters aren’t generally heroic or anything.

Q:  You were an Army brat. How does that inform your work?

MOORE: You learn there’s a certain amount of universality to the human experience. And you also learn that behavior is mutable. If you grow up in one place and in one culture you believe that’s the way people behave. But it isn’t. You go somewhere else and suddenly people speak differently. They move differently. Less so now because we have a different kind of world. We have a world that’s informed by television. So people are connecting and identifying through that. But when I grew up, there were huge cultural differences. You also learn that behavior is not character. So because you had access to this from moving around, you are able to read it and dissect it.

“The Kids Are All Right”

Opens: July 16

Cast: Annette Bening, Julianne Moore, Mark Ruffalo, Mia Wasikowska, Josh Hutcherson