Julianne Moore's Play Takes On Iraq

Movie Star Comes To Broadway With Questions But Few Easy Answers

(CBS)  Over the past two decades, Julianne Moore has gone from a soap opera ingénue to one of Hollywood's top film stars, earning four Academy Award nominations. The only thing missing from her resume was Broadway, until recently she took to the stage in "The Vertical hour."

Moore sat down with The Early Show co-anchor Harry Smith to talk about the play.

The play is a very powerful story about an American war correspondent turned academic who supports the invasion in Iraq. It's basically an intense conversation between Moore and Bill Nighy.

"She's a liberal who supported what she calls the 'liberation' of Iraq," Moore said. "Now that doesn't mean she thinks the war is a good idea. What's interesting about this is there's so much text in this play. People sometimes get overwhelmed by the ideas. What David Hare has done here is really kind of layer in everything we are all feeling now, as people in the west versus what's going on."

But that doesn't mean "The Vertical Hour" is an attack on the war.

Moore said of her character, "I am a woman whose heart has been broken by the war, who really believes in intervention, believes in help, and believes in America being a leader."

In the play, she's been to Bosnia and seen the things that war can do.

"What she thinks is we have a responsibility in the world as a country, as a nation, and she's broken-hearted," Moore said. "She's been broken-hearted."

Smith mentions that, at least in the beginning of the play, she's a particularly sympathetic character.

"She's not," Moore said. "I think the polls said yesterday 70 percent of Americans are opposed to the war, as am I. I think all of us feel it's an enormous debacle. It's a huge mess right now. As a culture, we are feeling incredible dismay and anger. So when a character stands up and says they believed in it, you know, I think that's all the audience hears and they get mad."

But no one will walk away from the show thinking there are easy solutions in Iraq.

"You have a character like Bill Nighy," Moore said. "He's a character that stands up and says he's very opposed to the war and then later on you realize he has isolated himself from the world and is not involved in anything. So you say, 'What do you do?' Do you stand back and say, 'I don't care, I give up'? Or do you risk being disliked and unpopular and say, 'I want to do something.' What do you do?"

What Moore did was make another movie. She will star opposite Clive Owen in "Children of Men" this Christmas.