Julianne Moore ain’t too proud to beg. The makers of her new movie, “The Forgotten,” discovered that last year, when they were trying to decide where to shoot.
Director Joe Ruben was leaning toward Toronto or another Canadian city, but Moore, a dedicated New Yorker, almost got on her knees trying to convince him to make the movie in her hometown.
“I was like, ‘Please, please, please!'” Moore recalls.
“I really wanted it to be here, especially since it was going to be during the school year.”
In the end, Moore won, and Ruben filmed the movie last fall among the old warehouses and cobblestones of Brooklyn’s DUMBO neighborhood.
At the end of every day, Moore would go home to Greenwich Village to play with her husband, director Bart Freundlich, and their children, Caleb, 6, and Liv Helen, 2.
“I’ll do everything I can to spend time with my kids,” she says.
And she has the clout to make it happen, especially after racking up four Oscar nominations, for “Boogie Nights,” “The End of the Affair,” “Far from Heaven” and “The Hours.”
Moore, 43, is one of Hollywood’s most respected actresses – some even call her “the next Meryl Streep.”
But she sees herself as “a working mother – just like so many other women,” she says.
She’s good friends with indie actress Hope Davis (“American Splendor”), who lives across the street from Moore and has a little girl named Georgia, who’s about Liv’s age.
On free days, the actresses have play dates together, hang out and watch Georgia and Liv play dress-up.
“My daughter’s a big princess,” Moore says. “She loves to get into my makeup and wear my shoes around the house.”
Caleb, meanwhile, “is a classic Yu-Gi-Oh, Pokemon sort of guy,” Moore says.
As a devoted mother, Moore was a natural for “The Forgotten,” an “X Files”-style supernatural thriller, opening Friday, about a woman mourning the death of her 8-year-old son – even as the rest of the world, including her husband, tells her the boy never existed.
Not that Moore freaked out over scenes where she had to say goodbye to her fictional son.
As soon as the cameras clicked off, she would be back to her jovial self.
“Acting is a such piece of cake for Julianne,” says her co-star, Dominic West.
“She would be laughing and joking and talking about cheese or something.
“Then they would go, ‘Action!’ and she would burst into tears.”
This fall, Moore will be working on another movie in New York, “Trust the Man,” written and directed by her husband. Her family will be glad to have her back.
This summer, she went to Toronto to film “The Prize Winner of Defiance, Ohio,” a drama based on a true story.
“Caleb told me I made a terrible mistake taking that one,” Moore says. “I thought I was OK because it wasn’t during the school year. But he said he wants me around in the summer, because that’s when he wants to have fun.”