Julianne Moore Learned How to Dance for Her Role as a Dancing Queen in Gloria Bell

No matter your age, there are always new things to learn. Just take it from Julianne Moore, who finally learned how to dance for her role as a dancing queen in Gloria Bell. In the film, Moore finds inner peace on the dance floor at night, where she meets her onscreen love interest John Turturro. But in real life, it took a lot of work for her to get to that point, as she revealed on The Late Show With Stephen Colbert.

“We dance a lot, and John is a really great dancer,” she said of working on the film. “He’s an actual salsa dancer…I’m not a dancer—I just dance in front of my kids to embarrass them. That’s the kind of dancer I am: the dancing-in-the-grocery-store dancer…that’s what I say to them: I’m just rehearsing for my life on stage.”

Outside of grocery store dancing, though, Moore didn’t have much experience with salsa or disco, which is perhaps surprising considering she starred in Boogie Nights. So to prepare for the film, she outsourced: “I had a dance teacher come over, and then John would come over and we’d do a little disco, and then we’d do a little salsa,” she said. “He’s great. He’s a great dancer and he loves to dance…I am so stiff at salsa.”

Interestingly, even though Moore and Turturro were both in The Big Lebowski, it wasn’t until Gloria Bell that she met her costar. “We were in the same movie,” she explained, adding that they “had no scenes together.” “We have a lot of mutual friends. But we had never worked together.”

Moore owes her newfound dancing talent to Turturro as much as to her instructor, as she recently explained to Variety. “John is a real dancer,” she said. “He came and danced with me at my house. My daughter was like, ‘There is a man outside who wants to dance with you.’”

Moore’s daughter, Liv Freundlich, is actually working with Moore on her next film project, After the Wedding. “She was a P.A. with us last summer,” Moore said. When asked if it was nice to make the movie, which her husband, Bart Freundlich, is directing, “a family affair,” Moore said, “It is, and you never get a moment alone. Not a minute.” If she needs alone time going forward, she should follow in her character Gloria’s footsteps and hit the dance floor alone.