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“Hello, I’m Julie,” said a radiant Julianne Moore, holding out her hand as she popped out of the elevator at Middleburg, Virginia’s Salamander Resort. Her hair was red, her skin was white, her dress as yellow as gold. A few hours later after a rapturous Middleburg Film Festival reaction to “The Debut” (December 11), we talked in a hotel meeting room. The A24 crowdpleaser has been wowing audiences and critics since Telluride.

Jesse Eisenberg has done it again. His follow-up to “A Real Pain,” which won Kieran Culkin the Supporting Actor Oscar, could score Best Actress for Moore. The musical comedy has earned Moore raves on the festival circuit for her role as a sad suburban homemaker turned anxious aspiring actress in a New Jersey community theater. A sixth Oscar nomination is inevitable, and possibly a second Oscar win after “Still Alice” in 2015. It’s hard to believe she launched her career in 1988 as a regular on soap opera “As the World Turns.”

Moore is the current Best Actress frontrunner, even though she has won before. Sometimes nabbing an Oscar is a disadvantage in the Oscar race. But not if the performance is undeniable: Katharine Hepburn holds the record with four, while nipping at her heels are three-time winners Meryl Streep, Frances McDormand, Jack Nicholson, and Sean Penn.

Eisenberg wrote a rich character for Moore, knowing what the veteran actress could do with the childlike housewife Mona who, in order to learn how to act, must find herself. The director and actress had worked together on “When You Finish Saving the World” (2022). “[‘The Debut‘] is about this woman who has been chewed up but not spit out,” said Eisenberg, quoting Mona’s signature song. “It’s my point of view through somebody I consider a muse. I was writing something about myself as a seven-year-old in 1990, but I couldn’t picture anybody else except her doing it.”

It helped that Moore had told Eisenberg exactly what she was looking for. “I said I had just done ‘Dear Evan Hansen,’ and I loved singing, and I would love to have another opportunity,” she said. “I told him that I would love to do more comedy, and I didn’t want to play some suffering mom.”

Eisenberg put all of this in the screenplay, “but in the most surprising and inventive way,” she said. “He’s such a specific writer. He’s so incredibly empathetic. He has a compassionate worldview. He understands creativity. All of that stuff went into this wonderful and delightful story. It’s joyful and life-affirming too.”

Moore didn’t know she was playing a seven-year-old version of Eisenberg until he started telling that to the press. “Then he was like, ‘This is my experience of being a kid and going to community theater.’ But I could sense that there was a personal point of view in it. I very much felt with Mona that she was on a subjective journey, and that he was inside of that. With Mona, I always knew he was looking through her.”

“The Debut” is told from her point of view, as she tries to talk the overbearing local community theater director Jerry (Paul Giamatti) into hiring her, an untrained actress. He does it because he has no one else. But first, he must teach her how to act.

Mona dresses like a schoolgirl, with skirts, blouses, cardigan sweaters. “She’s so contained, and the way she learns is so literal,” said Moore, “the way a baby learns, like, you make a face at a baby, the baby makes a face back, but they don’t have intention behind it. But they’re learning things in an exterior way, and then they match it with feeling later on. So everything she’s doing is a childlike way of learning.”

Mona goes from an invisible nonentity in her own home to someone who demands attention. “She’s a kid who has found friends for the first time,” said Eisenberg. “She’s the girl who transferred to the right school at seven years old, and then the first rehearsal happens, and she is told she is terrible, and she has no idea why. And it’s the girl who transferred to the right school and gets an F on the very first test, and then the rest of the semester is panicking, and all she’s seeing is everybody else get A’s, and she still has the F, and she doesn’t know what to do. And then the teacher pulls her aside and says, ‘You either show up, or you are out on your ass.’ And something switches in her, and she makes the decision: ‘I am going to show up.’ And she begins to turn into a monster.”

The theater troupe embraces Mona as she unfolds like a flower. “We’ve been like those theater kids cracking corny jokes and finding community,” said Moore. “It’s all done with so much affection. Jesse looks at that world with not a hint of malice.”

Giamatti’s director relentlessly pushes the newbie through her paces until they have a powerful confrontation on the empty stage where he forces her to break down. Eisenberg reduced the actors’ anxiety by placing the eight-page showstopper in the middle of the shoot: not the beginning, and not the end. On the first day he went over to Moore’s apartment to talk about the movie. He said, “I really don’t want you to worry about that scene. I don’t want you to worry about memorizing that because I know that as an actor, I would I lose my mind. I would just be drilling it all the time, and I wouldn’t be able to concentrate. We’re going to have a teleprompter on that day. So don’t worry about it.”

So Moore worked on it normally, she said, “like I worked on everything else in the movie. So when we got to it, I knew it. I didn’t need a teleprompter. He knew instinctively as a director and an actor that what scares us sometimes is just a volume of language. He didn’t want to freeze me up. And having a partner like Paul who was so awake and aware and generous made it a pleasure. We were enjoying it when we did shoot it.”

Moore and Giamatti had never worked together before. She once introduced herself to him in a bookstore in Montauk. “He was very shy,” she said. “He is the greatest scene partner. I didn’t expect him to be so generous. He’s so funny, and he’s so dear. He’s present, incredibly modest, and as a partner, so available. Paul and I would work on it occasionally. When we were doing that scene, the rhythm was so important in it. You throw something, he hits it right back. It was our sense together of keeping it aloft, keeping it moving, keeping the river flowing. It felt electric with the two of us.”

The big blowout happens early in the story. “In a lot of movies, that kind of set piece would happen later,” said Moore. “Instead, it’s like a discovery place. It’s where she starts to begin to unlock herself emotionally, but she doesn’t learn from it. She comes in the next day, and starts to rehearse. And her belief is that acting is size, that it’s just huge, right? That’s when she starts yelling. She thinks it’s about being loud, which then allows her to go on the next journey with Jerry, where he says, ‘Let’s talk about feeling and reality and intention.’ So she’s slowly putting these pieces together. But that’s the first moment where she attaches something outside of herself to her own emotion.”

The whole shoot was fast, as Eisenberg didn’t have time to muck about and often shot just one take of a scene. “She and Paul Giamatti are so good on take one,” said Eisenberg. “It’s embarrassing. This is a small budget movie. The first two days of our schedule, we filmed in one day. The first two days, which were big ensemble musical numbers, we filmed in one day because we were prepared as a crew, but the actors were perfect on take one.”

Moore didn’t feel rushed. “It doesn’t feel, working with Jesse, like you’re moving too fast,” she said. “Working in independent film, you’re always moving quickly because you need to. You don’t have the time. You don’t have the money. So you want to move through things quickly. But I never felt rushed with him. I never I never felt like I was leaving something, that I didn’t get to complete something.”

The challenge for Moore, as it is for every actor shooting out of order, was making her character changes seamless. Eisenberg started with the theater scenes, then shot her family, and then jumped into Mona’s increasing weirdness. “The hardest thing always is making sure that you’ve pitched things correctly,” Moore said. “You want to make sure that you’ve managed to match it to another scene. So it was always hard to figure out. That’s our job.”

Eisenberg wanted Mona to move from looking quite childlike in the beginning, and swiftly move through her evolving transformations. Moore had fun with the costumes, figuring out the crazy wigs, makeup, and outfits in the second half. “Jesse had written that Mona electrocutes herself and destroys her hair, and that she was going to get her hair cut,” said Moore, “but he hadn’t written in a color change. We were messing around with it and trying to figure out what to do with hair and makeup and wardrobe and we had this idea that by having her dye her hair dark and chop it off, I wanted to homage the great ladies of musical theater, Liza Minnelli and Chita Rivera and Patti LuPone. It’s a wonderful Easter egg for that character.”

Making everything easier for Moore was actor-turned-director Eisenberg, who’d tell her when to ‘raise the stakes’ or ‘go hotter.’ “He’s maybe the most collaborative person I’ve ever worked with my entire life,” said Moore. “He listens to everyone. He asks people for opinions. He’ll ask people for notes, in a way that I would be like, ‘you don’t have to do that. This is your movie. It’s your creation.’ But he does collate opinion in a way. He’s fascinating in his generosity.”

Needless to say, singing her centerpiece song (“This City May Have Chewed Me Up (But It Hasn’t Spit Me Out”) was nervous-making, given that Moore was surrounded by Broadway super-belters like Tony winners Danny Burstein and Bonnie Tillman. “These people have the voices of angels,” said Moore. “When I did sing that song for the first time, and they’re all sitting there watching me, I think they did feel worried for me because they have so much ease. The song that she sings is so beautiful. In the singing of the song, she’s attaching her own emotional experience suddenly to the song. She understands the song in the moment she’s singing that. Somehow she wants more, and she knows that this is an avenue for her to find that. And so it’s a journey back to herself: finding that creativity and connection and community brings her to an essential sense of self.”

If degree of difficulty counts with Oscar voters, Moore may have that advantage.