From her years as Frannie/Sabrina on As the World Turns, through early film roles in Nine Months and The Hand that Rocks the Cradle, to unforgettable star turns in classics like Boogie Nights and The Kids Are All Right, and now, starring as Sarah Palin in Game Change on HBO, Julianne Moore inhabits the screen in such a natural way it’s easy to feel you know her.
But as WebMD learned when we sat down with her in her Greenwich Village apartment for her WebMD the Magazine cover story, a few things might surprise you about the flame-haired four-time Academy Award nominee and mom of two:
1. She falls off the exercise wagon.
“This summer I couldn’t get myself to do anything. We have a place on Long Island and I’d take my paddleboard out, and I’d get in the pool and splash around, but that was it. So there will be a couple of months here and there where I’ll just stop working out.”
2. She’s scared of skiing.
“I don’t like balls, I don’t like sports, I don’t like to dive into the water or ski fast,” she says. “My husband [director Bart Freundlich] loves snowboarding, and so do my son and daughter, but I’m terrified. Every year we go, and I spend the day with the instructor. My second or third year, I got on skis and I just had a panic attack. So Bart got me and shuffled me out of the line and calmed me down and got me through it. But I’m not afraid of the dark, and I like scary movies. Bart’s afraid of spiders, so I pick up the spiders in our house.”
3.She nursed her kids past a year.
“In fact, I had only one working boob with Liv,” she says (daughter Liv is now 9 and son Caleb is 13). “With my son, one breast never functioned as well as the other, but then with Liv, I just had one superboob. And of course then they prefer that one, and there you are. So when I was at the Oscars that year, I had one whole kind of massive fake thing in my dress to even it out.”
4. She doesn’t like her freckles.
“I hated my freckles when I was a kid and I still hate them now. That’s why I wrote my Freckleface Strawberry series. In a lot of children’s books, problems just kind of disappear when you grow up, and that’s not what really happens. If you have big ears, unless you pin them back, they’re the same. My hair and my freckles are still the same. There’s nothing I can do about them. But now, they’re at the bottom of my list of things that matter and there’s other things I care about more.”
5. Her new motto is ‘just do it.’
“I turned 50 last year, and I think what happens to you then is that you evaluate your life and go, am I doing what I want to do? Am I spending my time the way I want? I’m in a place where I don’t want to say no to anything, any experiences. I’m going to Paris with my sister this weekend, and it’s really not making any sense for me to go. I’m finishing a movie tomorrow, and on Monday I start a book tour for the new book, and the Paris trip is jammed in between. I really shouldn’t go. But I’m really close to my sister and I feel like, why not? You could be dead, so just do it. That’s my attitude now: just jam it in. Just do it.”
Adapted from the cover story of WebMD the Magazine's January/February 2012 issue. Read the entire story here.
