Actress Julianne Moore spoke this weekend about leading-women’s shrinking roles in Hollywood and said she now avoids doing movies with “explosions and guns,” citing the violence that seems to be threatening to envelop the world.
“I’m less and less interested in tragedy, I would say,” the star said Saturday during the Kering Group-sponsored Women in Motion Conversations at the Cannes International Film Festival. “Particularly now at a time when things are rough globally, it’s hard for me to invest in a story that I think is pretend, where I feel like the depth of the emotion doesn’t measure up to what’s happening in the world.”
Her main sticking point seemed to be gratuitous explosions, guns and murders.
“I don’t like someone being murdered,” Moore said. “I don’t like explosions and guns. I don’t like histrionics. I don’t like things that raise the stakes without real feeling underneath. I mean, that actually bothers me because that’s like noise. I don’t know how to play it. I don’t want to watch it.”
Aurore Marechal/Getty Images
Julianne Moore walks red carpet at Cannes Film Festival on Sunday. (Photo by Aurore Marechal/Getty Images)
Moore touched on other topics as well, but her guns statement arguably drew the biggest social media backlash. Reactions ranged from comments listing or alluding to her past movies that have involved such violence, to her portrayals of a porn star in “Boogie Nights” in 1997 and of a 36-year-old woman who seduces a seventh-grader in 2023’s “May December.”
Moore had plenty of defenders as well, with one X commenter saying, “Julianne Moore choosing emotion over chaos is exactly why she’s respected worldwide.”
The actress has said she became a gun-control advocate after being deeply struck by the 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting in Newtown, Conn. Although she respects gun ownership rights, she noted in 2017 after the Las Vegas mass shooting that “we also have a responsibility to bear arms safely.”
Kering and Cannes honored her with the 2026 Women in Motion Award, given to “female artists whose careers and commitment have advanced the role of women both in cinema and in society,” be it in front of or behind the camera, Kering said. Director XXX got an Emerging Artist Award.
Moore also commented on the shrinking number of leading-women roles in Hollywood, which fell to 37% among the highest-grossing movies of 2025, a 10% drop from the previous year, Variety reported.
“It’s not endemic just to the film industry, it’s global,” Moore said, citing a lack of female representation in C-suites, media and higher education, among other male-dominated spaces.
“So I feel like it’s a bigger problem. And how do you change that?” she continued. “You do it slowly, steadily, mindfully, making choices, speaking up, using your privilege, hiring more, talking about alliances, changing things for us on set. I feel like women are each other’s greatest allies, and that’s the secret sauce.”