Julianne Moore: my obsession with Stephen King
The actress has been an admirer of King’s work since she was a teenager. Now the Oscar-winner is starring in an adaptation of the horror writer’s most personal work.
Julianne Moore thinks she was on a date when she first experienced the world of Stephen King, but she can’t exactly remember. Come to think of it, maybe she was with a group of girlfriends. What she can recall, and vividly, is the movie she went to see that night in 1976 — Carrie, starring Sissy Spacek — and the impression it made on a 16-year-old who just so happened to be the same age as the film’s flame-haired heroine.
“We pulled up to the parking lot, and there were hordes of kids,” she says now. “Hordes of them. There’s a long line snaking through the lot, and it was really crazy. And as we were going in, the last session was coming out, and the kids were white. They were terrified. They looked shocked. And then you see the movie, and you get to the end and it’s really sad and you want to cry … and then that horrific thing happens where the hand comes up out of the grave. And the whole place screams! Everyone just lost it. I fell apart. And we walked out white and shaking. It was probably one of the most memorable moments of my little movie-going life. And I loved it. I absolutely loved it. Because the fact that horror can elicit a feeling like that is absolutely thrilling.”
It’s a surprising admission from an Oscar-winning actress whose resume is littered with auteur dramas and literary adaptations but rather light on straight-up fright-fests (one of the few is the Carrie remake, released in 2013). But it helps explain why she signed on to star in the Apple TV+ series Lisey’s Story, the latest product from the Stephen King industrial complex, which is still going strong almost a half-century after that first screen adaptation became a surprise box-office hit.
Published in 2006, Lisey’s Story is considered by King to be his most personal work, written in the aftermath of a bout of pneumonia. Upon his return from the hospital, the author walked into his study and found it empty — his wife Tabitha had begun redecorating in his absence — and was struck by the idea of being a ghost in his own home.
The series adaptation was written, unusually, by King himself, and follows Lisey (lee-see) as she deals with the death of her husband, a bestselling novelist (played by Clive Owen) with a famously febrile imagination and readers whose devotion borders on the religious.
All eight episodes were directed by acclaimed Chilean filmmaker Pablo Larrain, and his involvement is a measure of the author’s current status. Once considered a trash merchant, time and nostalgia have made King respectable, his reputation aided by the fact that the boundary between genre and literary fiction has become increasingly blurred. As Moore points out, King also became famous for the invocation of popular culture long before it was common practice.
“That was unusual,” she says. “This guy was mentioning a cereal brand and going to the mall and all these things that were familiar, but it was not considered something you would see in literature, right? And now he has so entered our vernacular that you can kind of … use him within himself, which is amazing. There’s this weird meta experience with it.”
There are plenty of allusions to King’s other work in Lisey’s Story. An empty snowbound hotel recalls instantly The Shining’s Overlook Hotel. But what drew Moore to the story, even more than the chance to inhabit the King meta-verse, was the marriage at its centre, inspired by the author’s own but not strictly autobiographical.
Scott Landon (Owen) grew up with a violent father, and his escape was via a secret world imagined in such detail that it became real, a place of creative replenishment that could also turn deadly. Lisey’s halting attempts to understand this world and even access it occupy the first few episodes, which skitter back and forth between Lisey’s present-tense existence and scenes from the couple’s earlier life together.
Moore, who is married to director Bart Freundlich and has two grown children, was attracted to the script’s almost collage-like rendering of a long and intimate relationship — and struck by how perfectly suited the subject was to the length of time afforded by streaming.
“In every marriage,” she says, “you’re bearing witness to each other’s lives. And really what you create together — the life you build together — is your secret world. Nobody else knows about that. And I thought it was really fascinating the way that Stephen has taken this idea about what it means to witness somebody’s life and go through it with them and made (it) manifest in terms of another universe. A supernatural universe.”
Moore is quick to note that they filmed the entire thing like a movie, rather than a television show — “we didn’t shoot it episode by episode” — and Lisey’s Story certainly has none of the conventional hooks or cliffhangers we associate with the form. Whether that’s a good thing is up for debate.
King has been accused before of taking his sweet time to get to the point, and the show’s first few episodes felt, to this viewer, both diffuse and a little repetitive. Lisey grieves for her husband, fends off the demands of an academic who wants access to her husband’s papers, and cares for a self-harming sister who may be inhabiting the same otherworld as her husband. But she doesn’t have an object, exactly, and the non-linear way in which the story unfolds creates a montage effect. Scenes shorn of context slide by weightlessly, and the overall feel is slightly disorienting.
I ask Moore what she thinks of the show, now that she’s seen, as I have, the first four episodes.
She laughs. “What did you think”?
I tell her, perhaps a little cravenly, that I’m intrigued about where it’s going, because the show doesn’t exactly hold one’s hand.
“Right, right,” she says. “I think what’s so interesting about Pablo’s impact on this is that your experience of the narrative unfolding is through Lisey’s experience. The novel is very much like this too; she’s kind of leading you through it. She doesn’t know what’s happening. She’s following these clues. So your audience’s experience is as subjective as Lisey’s, which I think is cool.”
Larrain brought the same sense of dreamlike inertia to Jackie, his 2016 biopic of Jackie Kennedy. And the filmmaker was “a great partner,” according to his leading lady — especially when it came to keeping track of where her character was at, emotionally speaking, in overlapping timelines.
“As you go through these layers of time, you’re also moving through memory, much in the way that people do in real life. Where everything that’s happened before, in their past, impacts the future or their present, right? Because we’re always living our whole lived experience in accumulation.”
The challenge, says Moore, was structural, and Larrain was always on hand to remind her which part of the puzzle they were shooting, and to keep a firm hand on the overarching tone.
The plot, such as it is, emerges in the form of a classic King villain, played by Dane DeHaan as a basement-dweller with a fanatical attachment to Lisey’s dead husband and an overwhelming rage that his wife might be hoarding unpublished manuscripts.
He’s assigned the task of persuading her to hand them over by a professor who doesn’t realise just how unbalanced his bloodhound might be, and can’t put him back on the leash once released. And it’s the prolonged and violent confrontation between this po-faced young man and Lisey (when it finally arrives, after much dithering and some truly inept police work) that precipitates a reckoning with the parallel dimension that has long been a spectre in her life and marriage.
The entitlement of readers is one of King’s common themes. Kathy Bates won an Oscar playing the ultimate bad fan in Misery — another of the author’s favourites among his own novels. And surely movie stars occasionally have to deal with the same level of parasocial adulation. I wonder if Moore herself ever has had a bad experience? There’s a long pause.
“Stephen has had (dealings with) challenging fans, because he is such a global phenomenon. In terms of my own experience … people do feel close to you, which is not always a bad thing. I’ve been very touched by somebody coming up and saying they saw something in a movie and that it resonated with them personally. They felt seen and they felt understood. And that’s why we have books and movies.”
The concept of the imagination as a place we go to understand ourselves is made literal in Lisey’s Story. And it’s surely no accident that one of the principal locations in this phosphorescent netherworld looks like a Greek amphitheatre, with veiled chorus members ranged across the bleachers. What’s striking is the degree to which the imagination is presented not just as an escape but as something downright scary and even lethal — a formulation with which Moore has little patience.
“People sometimes will say to me, ‘I can’t believe you did that, and that’s so brave’. I’m like, it wasn’t really happening.” She laughs. “Let’s remember that. And that’s why the imagination is such a fantastic place, because anything is possible. But it’s also imagined. And I think what Stephen King does, which is so marvellous and so intriguing to all of us, is (explore) this idea that it’s porous somehow. And I think all of us recognise — that’s what our minds do. We think, wait a minute, if it feels this big, it must be real, right?”
Moore emerged out of New York’s theatre scene, but she’s no proponent of the Method as it’s popularly misunderstood. The idea that actors can inhabit a role so fully that they push themselves to the brink of insanity is, she says, simply a myth.
“I think the imagination and creativity is a corral, you know? It’s a place and knowing that you have a boundary allows you to do absolutely anything.”
Horror, of course, is the perfect playground. “I love the idea that our monsters are our feelings. And that we are able to metabolise what we feel and how we think through our exploration of these monsters. I love that.”
Lisey’s Story premieres Friday 4 June on Apple TV+.