When Julianne Moore first came to the Telluride Film Festival in 1994, she didn’t even know what a film festival was. She’d come with Vanya on 42nd Street —a film about a stripped-down, intimate rehearsal of Anton Chekhov’s play—and she remembers being put in charge of waking up her castmate Brooke Smith and driving her to the airport.

She even met Ken Burns that year. Three decades later, he was back in town too, and he remembered her.

“I think about the distance that I’ve come from not knowing even what it was,” says Moore, “to now, where there’s so many of the people I’ve collaborated with and people’s work that I admire.”

Of course, most everyone recognizes the Oscar-winning acting icon now. As we walk through the cozy halls of a hotel in Mountain Village, several people stop to greet her or express love for her work.

She’s back this year with The Debut , Jesse Eisenberg ’s charming, funny, surreal movie about a New Jersey housewife, Mona, who gets a role in the local musical and transforms during the process. It’s a tour-de-force performance—and one that Eisenberg knew only Moore could deliver.

“There’s not an actress on this earth that can play something so simultaneously alien and human,” Eisenberg tells Vanity Fair. “She’s so good and she’s so weird.

I’ve gotten to do that in two movies, and it’s my favorite acting style in the world, but no one’s better than her.”

Moore’s range is unmatched; she has the incredible ability to authentically be so many different women at the same time. We’ve seen it in May December , The Big Lebowski, Boogie Nights, Safe, Far From Heaven, Magnolia, Still Alice, and The Hours, just to name a handful.

She can do earnestness without armor; she can do melodrama; she can do repression; she can do unraveling. And it never feels forced or strained.

The role in The Debut would require all of that—plus singing.

Eisenberg based The Debut , which A24 will release in theaters on December 11, on his own experiences in local musical theater growing up, but wrote the part for Moore. He’d first worked with her on his feature film directorial debut, When You Finish Saving the World, which came out in 2022.

He remembers he had to delay the shoot six months when Moore landed a role in the adaptation of the hit Broadway musical Dear Evan Hansen . It was a major departure from her previous work because it was the first-ever role she’d done in which she’d have to sing.

“She would tell me all the time how she loved musicals, and she would love to sing,” says Eisenberg.

Eisenberg thinks maybe subconsciously he so wanted to work with Moore again that he ended up writing a musical for her. “What seemed like really organic things in the movie, some of it was just like, ‘Can I get her to sign on to this?’” he says. “That’s how much I love her, and that’s how much I was obsessed with this character.”