Julianne Moore’s new role sees her touting a gun on screen, for the first time in 15 years.
The Oscar winner takes the role of Madeline in Sharper, a movie she also co-produced. She co-stars with Sebastian Stan and John Lithgow in the thriller, which premieres in selected cinemas on February 10, before launching on Apple TV+ a week later.
It will be novel to see Moore using a weapon, as she has avoided taking such roles for over a decade – in line with her activism for gun control in the US. Her last known role with a firearm was in 2007, in the thriller Next.
She told the Times in London: “It’s not something I feel drawn to at all. I don’t find it appealing.”
What made Sharper okay? Apparently, that it offers a kind of morality tale, with everything in the story going wrong as a result of her use of a weapon.
Off-screen, Moore is the co-founder of pressure group Everytown for Gun Safety, whose website explains “10 million everyday Americans who have come together to make their own communities safer.”
Moore was motivated to take action by the Sandy Hook school shooting in 2012, which saw the death of twenty children and six adults.
She told the Times: “I’ve been very involved in the gun safety movement because I realised I wasn’t keeping my children safe if I didn’t do my part to change the legislation. I thought, ‘I’m not being the kind of parent I want to be.’ I thought that if something happened to them it would be my fault.”
The Times makes the point that Hollywood actors are in a tricky position talking about gun control, when films including weapons and violence make so much money at the box office.
But Moore reflected:
“It’s really important when you talk about gun safety and people blame entertainment to realise that the entire world consumes the same entertainment as the US, but the US has easy access to weapons. So I am not a big fan of violent movies, but I also don’t blame gun violence on entertainment.”
