Julianne Moore has sparked outrage online after saying she doesn’t like movies with “explosions and guns”.
In a recent interview with Variety at the Cannes Film Festival’s Kering Women in Motion Talk, the 65-year-old actress talked about the kinds of films she’s interested in appearing in at this point in her career, sparking backlash when she said, “I’m less and less interested in tragedy.”
“Especially right now, with all the tough times we’re going through globally, it’s very hard to get invested in a story that you’re pretending to be. You feel like the emotional depth and emotional scale is not up to what’s going on in the world, and you don’t want to be a part of that,” she said.
She elaborated on reading scripts and watching other films and noticing “when there are some stakes,” adding, “I don’t like easy stakes.”
“I don’t like people getting killed. I don’t like explosions and guns. I don’t like things that are staged. I don’t like things that raise the stakes without any real underlying emotion,” she said.
“So it’s like noise and it actually bothers me. I don’t know how it plays. I don’t want to see it.”
After a clip of the interview was shared on X, many fans took issue with Moore’s comments in the comments section, with many pointing out that she has appeared in multiple movies about guns and violence.
“I can’t count how many movies she’s made with guns,” one fan wrote. Another added: “It’s funny how artists forget their catalogs until it’s time to give a signal.”
Another fan shared, “That’s amazing! Play all the decadent, violent entertainment Julianne has happily participated in throughout her career.”
“A man gets his skull removed and his brain eaten in Hannibal,” a fourth fan wrote, referring to the sequel to Silence of the Lambs, which tells the story of serial killer Hannibal Lecter.
While many took issue with her comments, others defended her, writing: “Julianne Moore chose emotion over chaos, which is why she is respected around the world.”
“Actually, I agree with her! There’s enough violence in the world! We need good family values back in movies!! Family fun!! And movie theaters will be full again! We want to go to the theater, but there aren’t enough quality movies being released! That’s why ‘The Devil Wears Prada’ was so great,” said another.
This is not the first time Moore has faced backlash, with Vili Fualaau, who gained national attention in the late 1990s for his illicit relationship and marriage to a sixth-grade teacher, taking issue with his film May December, which tells a similar story, calling it a “rip-off” of his life.
Despite the backlash, speaking to Entertainment Tonight in January 2024, Moore claimed that throughout the film’s filming, director Todd Haynes was “always clear when we were working on this movie that this was an original story and a story about these characters.”
“So we thought that way, too,” Moore said. “This was our document. We created these characters together from this page.”
Moore won an Academy Award in 2015 for her starring role in Still Alice, in which she played a woman diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimer’s disease. She was previously nominated for her roles in “Boogie Nights,” “The End of the Affair,” “The Hours,” and “Far From Heaven.”
The actress attended the Cannes Film Festival as the recipient of Kering’s Women in Motion Award, an award given to actresses who have helped advance the role of women in society and film.
