Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: A film has its world premiere at Telluride, and the rapturous reception for its leading lady immediately catapults her into the pole position in the Best Actress race (not that she wasn’t there already).
Like Jessie Buckley, who went on to claim the Best Actress Oscar for last year’s Telluride-premiering Hamnet, Julianne Moore is the currently talk of this town for her starring role in Jesse Eisenberg‘s The Debut. The veteran actress plays a bored housewife who auditions for a community theater role only to find herself facing off against a tyrannical director played by Paul Giamatti.
The applause for her no-holds-barred performance actually started mid-movie, and continued throughout — cementing her position atop Gold Derby’s leaderboards. Admittedly the field is far thinner this year for the women versus the packed Best Actor race, but walking out of the theater, the commentary among the Telluride crowd was clear: “She’s going to get another Oscar.”
Best Actress
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Inde Navarrette
Obsession
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Moore won in 2014 for Still Alice, and has four other nominations for Boogie Nights, The End of the Affair, Far From Heaven, and The Hours.
Introducing the film, Eisenberg said the film was the thing he likes “more than anything” in his life, which terrifies him. “it’s about a woman who find the thing she loves more than anything in her life, which just looms large, and just makes her make all sorts of terrible decisions,” he told the audience.
Calling Moore “his muse,” he added, “I wouldn’t have made the movie if she wouldn’t have wanted to do it. The reason it exists is because of her.”
