Julianne Moore and Sydney Sweeney are at different points in their careers, but they have at least one thing in common: They’re both able to play com
Julianne Moore and Sydney Sweeney are at different points in their careers, but they have at least one thing in common: They’re both able to play complicated, emotionally foggy characters capable of holding secrets until the moment they explode to the surface.
Echo Valley, their novel Apple TV+ film premiering June 13, is a perfect showcase for this ability. Moore plays Kate, whose troubled daughter Claire (Sweeney) shows up on her doorstep—covered in someone else’s blood. Kate must decide just how far she’ll go to protect her child. “These are my favorite kinds of movies: movies about relationships,” Moore tells Vanity Fair in her first interview about the film. “What will people do for one another? What kind of decisions do you make? How far will you go?”
Complicated, messy family relationships have always been a draw for the film’s director, Michael Pearce. His 2017 film Beast centered on a toxic mother-daughter relationship; his 2021 film Encounter was about a father trying to protect his sons. “There’s something about complex, familiar relationships that’s fascinating,” he says. “We hope the audiences find it a very gripping crime film, but that there’s this very rich, complicated relationship to be engaged with.”
The British filmmaker wrote the scripts for his previous two features, but was looking to direct something from another writer this time around. Echo Valley—by Mare of Easttown scribe Brad Inglesby—not only put family relationships right at the center, but wrapped them up in an edge-of-your seat thriller. “Usually I read either a script which has great characters, but they’re in need of a really compelling story, or I read very genre-driven material, but the characters feel like archetypes and they’re not really developed,” he says. “When I read Brad’s script, it was in the bull’s-eye where I got everything that I wanted. It had these rich and textured characters, and it felt like it was a film for grown-ups.”
Moore was cast first. Kate is dealing with deep grief after the loss of her partner. She’s isolated on her farm in Pennsylvania, where she tends to her horses and gives riding lessons. When her farm needs a novel roof, she goes to her ex-husband to ask for the money—but ends up asking him for more than it costs. “That, to me, was kind of a wonderful clue into who this person was, and to this person who’s not necessarily going to reveal her needs or desires or motivations to anybody else,” Moore says. “There was a sense of secrecy about her, and that was the first time I really got kind of hooked into her.”
Pearce says Moore, a six-time Oscar nominee who won best actress for Still Alice in 2014, was able to play the many different sides of Kate. “She can be super vulnerable, and she’ll find a way to do it that’s specific and nuanced. She can play that sort of fragility with her character,” he says. “But Julianne’s a very strong personality. You totally buy that. She has the grit and resolve to contend with the things that are happening to her.”
Sweeney, best known for her roles on Euphoria and The White Lotus, was cast as Claire in part because she was able to deliver on the intensity of Claire’s emotions. “It’s kind of spooky how quickly she can get to a very raw emotional place when you call ‘action,’ and she’s just straight away exactly where the character needs to be. Which is often a very place of extreme emotional duress,” Pearce says. “Then you’d call cut and maybe change your lens, and she’s very light. You’d call ‘action’ again, and she’s straight there in a matter of seconds.”
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