Speaking with journalist Angelique Jackson, Moore described the award as “a thrill” and “a tremendous honor,” but also as a rare interruption in the momentum of an actor’s life. “As an actor, you’re part of a gig economy,” she said. “You’re always kind of going from one job to the next job to the next job.” To be celebrated, she suggested, is to be forced to turn around and see what all those accumulated roles have become: “You go like, wow, this is something that I’ve created or I’ve accumulated in my life.”
For Moore, the origin story was not cinema but reading. Before film sets, awards seasons, and Cannes ovations, there was the intimate shock of discovering herself in books. “It was sort of miraculous to feel seen in that way,” she recalled. “How do they know this about me?” That revelation, she said, became the emotional seed of her acting life: the realization that art is powerful because it is specific enough to feel private and universal enough to belong to everyone.
That tension, specificity and universality, became one of the talk’s strongest themes. Moore spoke about cinema as “an elaborate game of pretend,” but never diminished it as frivolous. Pretending, in her telling, is serious business: a collaboration among actors, directors, designers, writers, and crews, all attempting to capture “what it means to be a human being, what it means to be alive.” The result, she added, is almost miraculous because film leaves behind “an object, this document that can last forever.”
Much of the conversation circled back to one of Moore’s great obsessions: point of view. As her career has evolved, she said, she has become increasingly alert to whose story is being told, who is being flattened, and who is being allowed to exist fully. “What I’m looking for in a story is where is the point of view,” Moore said. “I want to be clear about whose story it is, how it’s being told, and whether or not it’s accurate.”
It is not, she explained, about always being the protagonist. Moore is perfectly willing to play the wife, the girlfriend, the foil, the woman orbiting another character’s crisis, as long as the writing knows who she is. “Nobody’s a villain and nobody’s the bad guy,” she said. “Everybody’s always acting out of what they believe is true and right.” It was a concise acting philosophy, but also a feminist one: women do not need to be idealized on screen; they need to be understood.
That is partly what drew her to her upcoming collaboration with Jesse Eisenberg, whose script she described as one of the few in her career that made her feel “electrified.” The film, she said, may be a comedy, but it understands something profound: the emotional weight of belonging. “It’s really a story about a person who finds the world that she wants to commit to and finds a place where she feels valued,” Moore said. “Those are the kind of emotional stakes I understand.”
Inevitably, at a Women In Motion event, the conversation turned to the broader state of women in cinema. Moore was clear-eyed rather than celebratory. Representation, she argued, is not only an industry problem but a global one. “There’s not representation in the C-suite. There’s not representation in media. There’s not representation in higher education,” she said. The work of changing that, she added, is slow and unglamorous: “How does a mouse get through a wall? One bite at a time.”
Her prescription was practical: make choices, speak up, use privilege, hire more women, build alliances. “Women are each other’s greatest allies,” Moore said. “That’s like the secret sauce. We are the ones that have each other’s backs. We are the ones that hire each other. We are the ones that write stories about ourselves.”
The sentiment carried through her reflections on other actresses, from Meryl Streep, whom Moore called “the gold standard” to Nicole Kidman, Salma Hayek, Isabelle Huppert, and Emma Stone. Speaking about Streep, Moore remembered seeing someone who was both “touchable and untouchable,” human and glamorous, precise and brave. Of actresses more broadly, she rejected the old cliché of female rivalry. “There’s an incredible alliance among actresses,” she said, describing women who auditioned against each other for decades and still understood one another’s strengths.
Perhaps the most intimate moment came when Moore spoke about her daughter, who had once been bumped up to business class on a flight and was shocked to find the cabin filled almost entirely with men. Moore’s response was brief and brutal: “Welcome to my world.” For a young woman raised in spaces of relative gender balance, the sudden visual evidence of inequality was jarring. “You don’t see it until you see it,” Moore said.
And yet Moore’s advice to her children was not bitterness, but preparation. “Work ethic is more important than anything else for a young person,” she said. Confidence, she argued, is not some magical quality bestowed at birth. “Confidence is something that you have when you have prepared yourself.”
By the end of the talk, Moore had offered something more enduring than anecdotes from a decorated career. She had articulated a worldview: follow your interests, value pleasure, protect specificity, support women, and never confuse noise with feeling. “Being interested in people, being interested in material, being interested in the world and in travel and in conversation,” she said, “brings you everywhere.”