Award-winning actress Julianne Moore said she and her "Carrie" teen star Chloe Grace Moretz hewed to the Stephen King book version to tell the story of the bullied teen with telekinetic power their own way, separate from the original 1976 critically-acclaimed horror movie.
Julianne Moore, who plays Carrie's mother, told Health magazine that it was important for her and Moretz to not get caught up in trying to duplicate the performances of Sissy Spacek as Carrie White and Piper Laurie as her mother in the original movie. Spacek and Laurie were both nominated for Oscars for their acting in the movie.
"I mean, listen — nobody's going to beat Sissy Spacek and Piper Laurie," Moore said in the Health article in its November edition. "So it wasn't about trying to repeat that; it was just telling the story in our way.
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"The mother is obviously psychotic and a religious fanatic, and she and Carrie are this isolated little community of two where the child is her only world. And what was so striking, to me, was the idea of social isolation and what that does to a person. This poor little girl, trapped in her mother's crazy world," said Moore, a four-time Oscar nominee herself.
While the movie was updated to reflect the today's times, from cellphone camera's to references to television shows like "Dancing With the Stars," the overarching theme of bullying and teen isolation proved to endured with time,
according to Christian Science Monitor.
Moore told the Monitor said she relied on Stephen King's 1974 novel, from which the movie was taken from, to give her context.
"(Bullying is) a difficult issue to address," Moore told the Monitor in an interview for a story posted Wednesday. "There's a huge spectrum when it comes to bullying. There are a lot of things that come under that heading like teasing that aren't necessarily bullying. It's not something you can be pithy about it. I kept going back to Stephen King's impetus for writing the book, and that's how damaging isolation can be to people."
Moretz said she found herself with the same challenge of Moore, breathing new life into an iconic character.
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"As an actor, I just needed to live in my character and not think about Sissy Spacek's performance or how this is an iconic scene or anything like that," said Moretz.
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