Julianne Moore Thinks "Aging Gracefully" is Stupid

I’m gonna call my shot here: Julianne Moore will receive a Best Actress Oscar nomination for The Debut. I saw the movie at TIFF and it’s a blast but she’s excellent. Of course, she’s always excellent, but seeing her as a timid housewife who turns into a method actor egomaniac for a community theatre musical was a riot. Imagine if the “A Streetcar Named Marge” episode of The Simpsons featured a twist where Marge went full Faye Dunaway.

In an interview with Elle, Moore discussed the film and her many decades of stellar work. It’s a good read because Moore is always lovely, but it was this part on aging that really stood out to me. For Moore, “aging gracefully” is a weird comment to make to someone and she’d like to exclude herself from the conversation:

When they say “aging gracefully,” I’m like, “What is that supposed to be? We don’t have a choice. We age one way or another. It is a fact. And it’s an uncomfortable fact, because it leads to death.” So that’s where everything gets conflated, because people talk so much about looks, and really at the bottom of all of that stuff is that we all enjoy being alive and we want to function as well as possible and we don’t want to die. So it’s like, “We can talk about that, about what it means to live,” but then cosmetic stuff, you’re just like, “Ah, that’s a whole other deal.”

There’s not a right way or a wrong way to age. So given that we have a limited time on earth, let’s not put that pressure on ourselves that we’re doing it wrong. I read that Helen Mirren said something like, “There’s this idea that somehow the things that happen to you when you’re older will feel less interesting to you because you’re old.” And she was like, “They don’t. They feel just as interesting.” And I think as a young person, you don’t always know that, because we’re always so focused on ourselves, we just assume that when we’re older, nothing will matter. But it does.

Right on.

I always remember an interview Moore gave about 18 years ago where she admitted that she was always hungry. “All actresses are permanently hungry,” she said. She meant it as a joke but it felt very real to me, something that people like her weren’t supposed to admit. Being a woman in the public eye requires a level of obsessive focus on your appearance that is stifling and unwinnable. You can’t gain weight or visibly age because then you’re ready to be downgraded to grandmother roles or forced into the skip of unemployability. But don’t conform too much with surgery or GLP-1s because then you’re not “aging gracefully.”

What does that even mean? You can’t reject it entirely like Madonna or you’ll be derided. Age naturally with zero interventions and everyone will say you’re a hag who let herself go. It’s like when men say they prefer the natural look on women but what they mean is extremely artfully done make-up that looks as though you’re bare-faced.

Aging is a privilege, and it sucks that we’ve demonized it so much. I think Moore hits the nail on the head when she says, “we all enjoy being alive and we want to function as well as possible and we don’t want to die.” Looking older makes us fearful that everything is falling apart and our time is limited. And then you’re judged for not looking like a model when you’re just getting on with things? Just let us be, man!