T Magazine turns to the superb actress Julianne Moore for this dramatic exploration of a woman in and out of her role, lensed by Inez van Lamsweerde and Vinoodh Matadin. Joe McKenna styles the Vermeer-skinned beauty with fierce, ‘Carrie’ hair by Christiaan./Makeup by Peter Philips. 

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At 52, an age when decent roles can be hard to come by for women, Moore is working more than ever. “What Maisie Knew,” a heart-wrenching indie in which she plays a narcissistic rock singer in the midst of a divorce — failing tragically to parent her young daughter, played by newcomer Onata Aprile — opens in May. It will be followed by “Don Jon,” the writing and directing debut of Joseph Gordon-Levitt, in which she plays a grieving widow who tutors Gordon-Levitt’s porn-obsessed mook in the mysterious yoys of authentic lived experience and sexual intimacy. (Moore has often been paired with younger men in her films, and her husband, the director Bart Freundlich, is nine years her junior.)

Then comes “Carrie,” based on the Stephen King novel, in which Moore plays the title character’s lunatic mother. Resisting the temptation to camp it up, Moore approached the part as she usually does: finding the confused and desperate woman beneath the surface. “The only family she has is this child, so when she starts to move away from her and into the world, it’s incredibly threatening,” Moore explains. “All she ever does is warn Carrie about the outside world — ‘They’re going to laugh at you, they’re going to laugh at you, they’re going to hurt you,’ — cause that’s been her experience.”