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women’s roles on screen but when you get a script that has an amazing, complex role for a woman, and then there’s two – do you immediately start thinking who your co-stars could be? Julianne Moore: This was astonishing. And Natalie and I have talked about this, the fact that here’s a relationship that’s so intimate, so challenging, so unusual – and they’re not related to one another, it’s not a love story, it’s simply two independent women and their interaction with each other. And it’s combative and kind of complicated and admiring. And when I think about Gracie’s desire, she so much wants approval from this woman. She’s saying, ‘This is who I am, I want you to see me, but see me how I see myself too.’ She’s dropping all these crumbs about how she wants to be seen and then gradually starts to crack under the pressure of actually being seem/ So that kind of challenge to be able to play that with someone, to have that like in the make-up scene, to have that kind of intimacy with another actor/actress is very unusual, as I think a lot of female performers would attest to. Did you know each other before going into this? Natalie Portman: We didn’t know each other well but we had met several times. Julianne Moore: I wrote Natalie an email after ‘Black Swan’ because I so admired that performance. And I’d seen her around at like press events or screenings, but just socially. And I was just so blown away by that performance. But we hadn’t worked together until now. Natalie Portman: Yeah and I’ve admired Julianne my entire career. It’s just like film after film after film. She’s so spectacular and I had pinch myself everyday that I got to work opposite her. And with Todd it was like [wow!]… anyway. Natalie, can you talk about the amazing to-camera monologue you deliver, which evokes gracie so scarily well? Natalie Portman: First of all, it’s an amazing piece of writing, that is like a rare moment where the character is alone. And so this movie which is many ways is about performance, is a moment where there is this dual thing where she is performing a monologue but she is, for one of the only times, without an audience. So she’s actually not performing and there’s something incredibly truthful about that moment. And it was a gift that Todd chose to shoot it that way because with the limited time we had we were able to do many takes, I think we did eight takes. But it was so fun to get to play and so lucky. I mean we knew it was only going to be one take that we used, so we just tried lots of different things, things that were more cold, more emotional, more varied, more se-xual. We just like got to play, which was super lucky. And yeah, I feel like that moment and then the moment in like the pet store are like two moments where she’s alone and you kind of feel like in those moments you know her better than any other time. Because the two of them are master manipulators and master performers who can like shift to whatever the situation calls for. So it’s a pleasure when you get to experience them when they’re not trying to be anything for anyone else. Was it intimidating to know they were going to hold the camera on your face for like five minutes? Natalie Portman: Yeah, I think mainly as an