Julianne Moore on good times with Clooney and Damon — and 20 years since The Big Lebowski

WHAT’S better than one Julianne Moore? Two Julianne Moores. That’s exactly what director George Clooney delivers in his new black comedy Suburbicon.

SET in an idyllic American neighbourhood in 1959, Suburbicon takes viewers into the home of the Lodge family, who spiral into a mess of increasingly bad decisions after two heavies invade their house, taking the family hostage.

Julianne Moore plays not just Rose, the wife of Matt Damon’s Gardner and mother to Noah Jupe’s Nicky, but Rose’s covetous twin sister, Margaret.

“She’s terrible, she’s dreadful,” says Moore. “But what I loved about Margaret is, she’s somebody who so desperately wants another life, she wants everything her sister has and she will do everything she can to get it — that was interesting to me, because she’s complex.

“She’s obviously not entirely in control of what she’s doing, one decision is based on another, they keep snowballing. But her desire is what leads her along.”

Moore says it was “a pleasure going to work every day” to see what Damon — who sullies his reputation as the nicest guy in the world with this murky role — would come up with.

“He’s not only the nicest guy in the world, but one of our best actors.”

In playing twins, Moore also had to work opposite herself. How was that?

“Oh God!” she exclaims. “Let’s see ... consistent — that’s the one thing you can say about working with yourself. I did it a long time ago, I played twins on a soap opera. And the thing I learnt is that there’s no surprise when you work with yourself, which can be boring. It’s always more interesting to work with another, real person.”

Writer/director/producer George Clooney, actors Julianne Moore and Matt Damon promote Suburbicon at the Toronto International Film Festival. Picture: Kevin Winter/Getty Images/AFP

Somehow Moore, who won the Best Actress Oscar in 2015 for her performance as a woman with early-onset Alzheimer’s in Still Alice, had never worked with Clooney prior to Suburbicon. Her first time, she says, was “wonderful”.

As Damon is “chatty and easy” to be around, so too is Clooney. In fact, Moore says, Suburbicon was “one of the nicest jobs I’ve ever had. We would all say that: ‘Oh my God, this job is fantastic!’”

In return, Clooney says Moore “can literally do anything”. The director credits his leading lady for coming up with the scene where the plainer, meeker Margaret dyes her hair blonde to mimic her sister.

“It’s a physical manifestation of wanting her sister’s life,” Moore explains. “Rose was always the pretty sister, Rose got the guy, Rose got the house, Rose got the kid, Rose got the life that Margaret wants. Margaret is the single sister, helping out and working at the grocery store. She has no agency, she has nothing. So in those days, how do you get that kind of life?

“Well you have to marry into it. So Margaret ends up taking that over.”

With a younger sister Valerie and brother Peter, Moore, 56, had some experience of sibling rivalry to draw on, but nothing to the dark extremes of Suburbicon’s twins.

“My sister and I are within a year and three days of each other, so we were always very close,” she says. “We were almost like twins, so we differentiated ourselves a lot — there would be things that she did that I didn’t and vice versa. Like all sisters we would argue about things, but we continue to be really close to this day.”

Matt Damon bucks his nice guy image in Suburbicon

While the Lodge household descends into murder, next door the first black family to move into the suburb are faced with neighbours protesting their presence: banging pots and pans at all hours, shouting racial abuse and hanging Confederate flags.

This side of the story comes from Clooney and his writing partner Grant Heslov, who melded their idea, based on a real-life incident, to a script written by Joel and Ethan Coen years earlier.

Launching Suburbicon at the Venice Film Festival last month, Clooney described it as an “angry” film. And even though it was shot in 2016, audiences will note its uncanny parallels to the white supremacist clashes in Charlottesville, Virginia this past August.

“I was very impressed with what George did,” says Moore. “He lulls you in, he starts this movie in a sense of relaxation, that this is gonna be about nostalgia, the perfect world and these lovely families. Then right away you’re thrust into not only a historical moment that has unfortunately been repeated in the United States, where we’re confronted with our own basest behaviours, but it also becomes that idea of, what happens when people’s desires are unchecked? Who are the casualties? It makes us examine our own cruelty.

“Given the unfortunate events in Charlottesville,” she adds, “the movie is even more timely. All of those things are a result of Trump empowering these horrific factions.”

Funnily enough, the era depicted in Suburbicon is probably the time President Trump and his followers would wish to return to with that rallying cry of ‘make America great again’.

But as Clooney told Deadline in Venice: “It was that Leave it to Beaver time when we thought everything was simple — and if you were a straight white man it was. But other than that, it probably wasn’t.”

Julianne-Moore will reunited with director Todd Hayne for the fourth time in the eagerly anticipated WonderStruck.

And Moore argues that America’s greatness lies in its diversity.

“It’s great because we have come from everywhere else, because we believe in ourselves, in our futures. That’s what made America great and that’s why people continue to come to the United States for those opportunities. So the use of that slogan is offensive and incorrect.”

Suburbicon isn’t the only film of Moore’s to wow one of the big festivals in 2017. Earlier in the year, her latest collaboration with Todd Haynes, Wonderstruck, premiered at Cannes. (It opens here December 14.)

In the stunning movie, about two deaf children on intertwining New York quests decades apart, Moore plays a 1920s silent film star — yet another example of how the actor can seamlessly immerse herself into different eras, be it the 1950s of Suburbicon, the ’60s of A Single Man or the right now of The Kids Are All Right.

She’s not sure why she’s so adaptable to different eras, but Moore reckons it comes down to studying how the constricts of society at any given time affected people’s physicality: “How they moved, how they spoke, how they presented themselves.”

Wonderstruck marks Moore’s fourth time working with Safe and Far From Heaven director Haynes. And though the Coen brothers weren’t a physical presence on the Suburbicon set, Moore also goes way back with them — 20 years, in fact, to her role in their cult classic The Big Lebowski.

“You know how I know it’s been 20 years?” she asks. “I was pregnant with my son (Caleb), who is 19 and will be 20 in December. That’s crazy.”

Caleb turning 18 “was a sucker punch, very emotional,” she admits with a laugh. “But now my husband and I are looking at each other like, ‘20!’ Even our daughter (Liv), who’s 15, was like, ‘Mummy, you have a 20 year old, is that weird?’

“It is, but it’s also kind of great because you realise there’s always something new to look forward to.”

SUBURBICON OPENS OCTOBER 26

Originally published as Julianne Moore on good times with Clooney and Damon — and 20 years since The Big Lebowski