Julianne Moore in "Freedomland."

NEW YORK -- It is called "acting" after all. So it shouldn't be a surprise that Julianne Moore presents a sharp contrast to the miserable, terminally sobbing recovering drug addict she plays in the movie Freedomland.

Moore's real-life fallback emotion is good-natured motor-mouthery with a tendency toward bursts of volume and shrieking flourishes.

She laughs loudly, seemingly at the bluntness of her own response, when a reporter at a "round table" interview session asks her about the difficulty of being a mother and playing a woman who loses her child.

"Believe it or not," she says, her voice rising giddily. "I've gotten this question in every interview since I had a child. It's starting to bore me!" The short answer: No, it doesn't bother her. She has an "off" switch.

The fact is, Julianne Moore -- she of the four Oscar nominations (for Boogie Nights, The End Of The Affair, Far From Heaven and The Hours) -- is the kind of actor Laurence Olivier was talking about when he said to "method" man Dustin Hoffman, "Why don't you try acting, dear boy?"

That is, it's her day job. Moore has a husband (director Bart Freundlich)and two children at home in New York. And by accounts, they are not required to live with whatever character she's playing in her latest movie.

And even on the set of Freedomland, co-star Samuel L. Jackson says, she'd go from enthusing over the previous night's American Idol to soul-searing pain and psychosis, to reality-TV gossip again, instantaneously at the calls of "action" and "cut."

"There are people that work like I work," Jackson says, "that sit at home and do all the stuff they need to do before they get there. So (on set) we could sit around and talk about anything and everything. And at the time Julianne was kinda caught up in American Idol, and we'd be both standing there talking, 'Oh Bo (Bice) was singing so goood last night!'

"And (director) Joe (Roth) would say 'Action!' and she'd be like (lets out heart-rending sob), and then there'd be 'Cut!' and it'd be like, '... and I do so hope he wins tonight!'

"It was refreshing, 'cause to be in that space the way some actresses would, for 81/2 weeks, would have been just devastating."

Taken from the novel by Richard Price, Freedomland was inspired by the case of Susan Smith, the South Carolina woman who, in 1994, reported that she'd been carjacked by a black man who'd driven off with her two children. It took nine days before she confessed to having killed them herself, during which time numerous "suspects" had been interrogated.

In Freedomland, a New Jersey housing project is put in lockdown by the police after an ex-drug addict and daycare worker named Brenda (Moore) gives a hysterical and frankly fishy story about being carjacked by a black man who'd driven off with her 4-year-old son.

With a simmering race riot as background noise, Brenda finds herself permanently attached to a cop from the projects named Lorenzo Council (Jackson). As friends from the 'hood assail him with angry charges of "Uncle Tom," Council stays on Brenda, watching her story unravel, and seemingly her sanity as well.

Moore was clearly as taken with Jackson as he was with her. "Sam gave me this necklace, isn't that pretty? It has my initial," she says, showing off a lovely parting gift. "I gave him a pen-and-ink drawing of handcuffs, because it was like we were handcuffed together the whole movie."

And through it all, she says, they didn't talk about acting once. "That's what I mean about Sam and I. We talked a lot about basketball, he's really good friends with Allen Iverson, which is really important to me and my family. We talked about y'know, people we'd worked with, directors we thought were idiots ...

"Everybody has their own methodology. If there's an actor on the set who likes to be quiet, likes to listen to music, and they get there with you somehow, that's cool, whatever. But what's thrilling and exciting is when you find someone who does like to do it like you. So then it's like, 'Heyyyy! Let's do everything together!' "

Moore becomes more serious when she gets to the movie's subject matter. Without giving away the ending, she says the Susan Smith case is a distraction.

"Susan Smith was truly psychotic (whereas Brenda) is, I think, not in a great place. She has been alone a lot, and she's almost rendered psychotic in grief. I feel she's somebody it's very easy for me to have empathy for. She's an incredibly marginalized single mother, estranged from her family, a recovering drug addict. And I feel you can see her on the street, particularly in New York or New Jersey. You can see her shopping at a Wal-Mart.

"You think initially this movie is about racial issues. But it's about poverty. It's about what having nothing does to people. With Hurricane Katrina, it didn't seem possible coming from our comfortable lives. How come they didn't get out (of New Orleans)? Well, they didn't have vehicles. Well, okay, but they'll be rescued right away, right? No, they don't get rescued right away. These are people who don't have a voice.

"And here, everything that happens in this movie could have been avoided if they had some kind of economic support. What happens to a single mother who can't afford a babysitter? I mean, what the f--- happens?" she says, getting more excited.

"What happens to a community if they don't have the economic power to say, 'You can't do this, you can't shut us down like this, you can't blame us for something we haven't done.'"

Still, the sturm and drang of serious moviemaking has remained off-limits at home -- even during the filming of Trust The Man, the romantic comedy she made for husband Freundlich. The movie, co-starring David Duchovny, Billy Crudup and Maggie Gyllenhaal, is due for release later this year.

"It's my job, it's what I do. There's a full, interesting life going on here, and you kind of feel like you have it all (with work and family). My life is more interesting because it's more challenging."

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