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Julianne Moore knows the importance of taking care of her health.
In an exclusive interview with PEOPLE, the actress, 64, opens up about how she has learned to take her overall health more seriously as she’s grown older and wiser.
“When you’re younger, you don’t think about much at all. I mean, you really feel impervious to everything, and to anything health and wellness related,” Moore — who has partnered with Lilly to launch its new Brain Health Matters campaign — says.
“But I think, the more life you’ve accrued, the more precious it becomes,” continues the Oscar, Emmy and SAG-award winner.
“You have more people that you’re taking care of, you have more people that you love, and you realize that you depend on your body, and if something goes wrong with your body, then it really affects your function,” Moore adds.
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Moore sustained a knee injury while she was filming a movie in 2024, and she says the experience reminded her about the importance of her health.
Recalling that it was “a big deal,” the Freckleface Strawberry author admits, “I was always so smug about my knees, because I did lots of stunts and stuff, and nothing ever happened.”
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“Then I had a weird [accident]. I was turning, twisting and falling, I was basically doing it all day, until I really hurt my knee, and I was like, ‘Wow, I really took this for granted, didn’t I?’ ” Moore continues.
“You tend to take things for granted until something happens, but you also learn about the things that will ensure that you can continue to do the stuff that you care about, like exercising regularly, eating well, sleeping — all of those things that help you perform to the best of your ability,” adds the mother of two.
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Moore’s focus on health plays a large role in why she partnered with Lilly, also known as pharmaceutical company Eli Lilly and Company, to encourage others to be on top of their brain health, specifically in terms of Alzheimer’s disease, and to be proactive if issues arise.
“We hear a lot, and we care a lot, about taking care of our physical health. … We’ll be really scrupulous about looking at everything, because we all understand that preventive care and early detection works, but we don’t talk about brain health enough, when, in fact, the brain controls function for the entire body,” she tells PEOPLE.
“So I think it’s really important to normalize talking to your doctor about what your risk factors are for Alzheimer’s, and what are some lifestyle changes you could make that could impact that, and to ask for a cognitive assessment, which I think should be a regular part of a checkup,” continues Moore.
Her 2014 film Still Alice followed a linguistics professor diagnosed with familial Alzheimer’s disease. The knowledge she gained of the illness through the role, Moore says, opened her eyes and inspired her work on the Brain Health Matters campaign with Lilly, which says women account for almost two-thirds of Alzheimer’s disease diagnoses.
“The people I spoke with, a lot of them were in the prime of their lives, they were still working, and what I noticed was how much Alzheimer’s affected function,” the star says. “It’s not just about memory, it’s not just about forgetting names and forgetting where you put your keys. It’s really about your ability to perform certain tasks and things that we care about while we’re alive, things that we enjoy.”
