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"It Takes Effort"
RD: Let's talk about the new film, which sounds a bit like Hepburn and Tracy to me.Moore: It's very old-fashioned, a classic romantic comedy. My character is a successful professional woman whose mother keeps pushing her to date and get married, and she just hasn't found time for it. I think deep down she doesn't feel that she's worthy. She's got her professional life together, but she doesn't have any control over her personal life. She's just going to let it go.
RD: A lot of women feel that way.
Moore: I felt like I understood her. I'd been like her myself. And then along comes this guy...
RD: Polar opposite.
Moore: Yeah. He really wants a relationship and thinks it's worthwhile, that you have to fight for it. They're divorce lawyers, so they've seen a lot of relationships that haven't worked.
RD: So what's the lesson you learn from this movie about relationships?
Moore: It's about whether they're going to work at it. I think people these days feel that if something goes wrong in a relationship, then it's time to walk away. You have to figure out a way to make it work. It takes effort. It's not just fantastic and we live happily ever after. Things go wrong, people make mistakes and stuff happens.
RD: You had a marriage end in divorce. Can you tell me how you came to the decision to let it go?
Moore: I think I felt very much like the character in this movie. I had some control over my professional life. I could understand that; I could focus on it. My personal life -- I just felt like it could take care of itself. I wasn't happy. I wasn't present, you know.
RD: You'd been married a long time.
Moore: You know, it's like a death. But, honestly, it was also transformative. It's a horrible thing, but I feel very lucky that I was able to change my life.
RD: So even though it was difficult, something good came from it?
Moore: Things are painful when you end a relationship. I'm happy for it all. We only understand things in relief, you know. If you have happiness and no pain, you're never going to understand what being happy is.
RD: That's kind of what you feed on as an actor, right?
Moore: It's not that I feel anything more intensely than anybody else. I hate it when actors say they're special and they feel more than other people. I'm always like, Please, you're just an actor. But it is our job to pay attention to life, to articulate it, understand it, and reflect it.
RD: Your husband is almost ten years younger than you. Did you ever think of the age thing as a problem?
Moore: I did initially. Because when I met him, he was 26 and I was 35, and we were at really different places. I didn't think the relationship was going to be serious. It just progressed. That's what you're looking for -- that it progresses naturally.
RD: What do you like best about him?
Moore: He's very sensitive. He's very present. He's interested in people. He's not selfish. He's a great father.
RD: Has being a mother changed you?
Moore: I love it. It's made me very patient. Things don't move at any kind of speed at all with children. It's very slow going. People talk about how it's tiring and really hard, and I always say it's not hard -- it's time-consuming. I think the happiness is what people don't prepare you for in a way, because there's almost no way to describe that.
RD: Because they love you so much?
Moore: No, it's not even that. I think it's instinct. We're so driven to create families. You start in a family, then you spend this period where you're running around by yourself and everybody's focus is hooking up with somebody else, and you do, and suddenly you realize you're back in the same thing you started in, only in a different position. That's your life journey.
RD: It's that hope in families that you'll always be together, and pain is very far in the future.
Moore: That's what love is all about. It's this tremendous, horrific fear that goes hand in hand with caring about somebody in that way where you can barely take a breath. My family went to L.A. without me. I had one more day in a movie, so the kids and Bart went the day before, and I was here, absolutely terrified that something would happen to them. I had to fly alone the next day. All I could think of was, Please let me get there, because I can't do that to them.
RD: Do your kids understand what you do, and that you're well-known?
Moore: Cal does. He came home and said, "Mommy, you're on magazines because you're famous." I said, "No, I'm on a magazine cover because I'm an actor." I try to explain what the purpose is, that this is my job, what I do when I have on my makeup. Even with mommies that go to office jobs, they wear makeup to work. I always take it off before I come home. One night I came home late, and Cal was like, "Why do you have that on? I don't like it." He associates it with somebody else who's not his mother.
RD: How much do you like to work?
Moore: With my kids, what I like to do is work a bunch, then take a year off. That's worked very well for me. I did three movies in a row. Before that I hadn't worked for sixteen months. My daughter was sixteen months old when I went back to work.
RD: But I know a lot of women in your business worry that if they take time off, they'll never work again.
Moore: I do worry. But life is short.
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