Julianne Moore is trying to break your heart with ‘Still Alice’

Julianne Moore’s devastating performance in “Still Alice” — as a college professor diagnosed with a rare form of Alzheimer’s shortly after her 50th birthday — has already earned her a Golden Globe and countless critical accolades, but can it get her that one trophy that has so far eluded her over her impressive film career? Prior to this year’s nomination for Best Actress, Moore has been nominated for an Oscar four times — two of them coming in the same year — but still doesn’t have a little gold man of her own, though that’s likely to change next month.

While Moore’s performance is a standout, it would probably be best if Academy voters didn’t watch the heartbreaking film with the actress herself in the room. “My husband and I saw it together, and I hadn’t seen any of it,” Moore says. “I heard all these sounds, I thought what the hell? What’s that noise? And he was just sobbing. So then I started talking, and he went, ‘Don’t ruin it!’ So I had to be quiet for about 20 minutes before I could be like, ‘Well, I wish that I had done this differently … .’ The first thing you always think after you see [your own] movie, you just see what’s not there — what’s wrong, what you wish you had done, whatever.”

Screening room etiquette issues aside, Moore also might not be the best cocktail party companion at the moment, as delving in “Still Alice” and the stripping away of a person’s self has left her with some heavy thoughts. “What do we have, really? It’s all a construct,” Moore offers, hands waving around in front of her. “Someone said, I can’t remember who, ‘We don’t have to do anything, all we have to do is die.’ It’s the only requirement. Other than that, we’ve made it all up. We made up language and we made up literature, we’ve made up work, and all this stuff, it’s all a construct. We do it because it delights us, it fascinates us. We found an economic system within it. But what is it, any of it? At the end of the day there’s just us as beings, so … I don’t know. It’s sort of a big idea, I don’t mean to get all down about everything like, ‘All we have to do is die.'” She doesn’t mean to, but she can’t really help it.

As for moving forward, Moore doesn’t see things getting much more uplifting. Up next for her? “I’m doing another really kind of fun movie,” Moore says with a chuckle. “In this one I die of cancer. I’m not kidding.”