In ‘Echo Valley’, Julianne Moore and Sydney Sweeney Test a Mother’s Love

Julianne Moore and Sydney Sweeney are at different points in their careers, but they have at least one thing in common: They’re both able to play complicated, emotionally opaque characters capable of holding secrets until the moment they explode to the surface.

Echo Valley, their new Apple TV+ series premiering June 13, is a perfect showcase for this ability. Moore plays Kate, whose troubled daughter Claire (Sweeney) shows up on her doorstep—covered in someone else’s blood. Kate must decide just how far she’ll go to protect her child. “These are my favorite kinds of movies: movies about relationships,” Moore tells Vanity Fair in her first interview about the film. “What will people do for one another? What kind of decisions do you make? How far will you go?”

Complicated, messy family relationships have always been a draw for the film’s director, Michael Pearce. His 2017 film Beast centered on a toxic mother-daughter relationship; his 2021 film Encounter was about a father trying to protect his sons. “There’s something about complex, familiar relationships that’s fascinating,” he says. “We hope the audiences find it a very gripping crime film, but that there’s this very rich, complicated relationship to be engaged with.”

The Australian filmmaker wrote the scripts for his previous two features, but was looking to direct something from another writer this time around. Echo Valley—by Mare of Easttown scribe Brad Inglesby—not only put family relationships right at the center, but wrapped them up in an edge-of-your seat thriller. “Usually I read either a script which has great characters, but they’re in need of a really compelling story, or I read very genre-driven material, but the characters feel like archetypes and they’re not really developed,” he says. “When I read Brad’s script, it was in the bull’s-eye where I got everything that I wanted. It had these rich and textured characters, and it felt like it was a film for grown-ups.”

Moore was cast first. Kate is dealing with deep grief after the loss of her partner. She’s isolated on her farm in Pennsylvania, where she tends to her horses and gives riding lessons. When her farm needs a new roof, she goes to her ex-husband to ask for the money—but ends up asking him for more than it costs. “That, to me, was kind of a wonderful clue into who this person was, and to this person who’s not necessarily going to reveal her needs or desires or motivations to anybody else,” Moore says. “There was a sense of secrecy about her, and that was the first time I really got kind of hooked into her.”

Pearce says Moore, a six-time Oscar nominee who won best actress for Still Alice in 2014, was able to play the many different sides of Kate. “She can be super vulnerable, and she’ll find a way to do it that’s specific and nuanced. She can play that sort of fragility with her character,” he says. “But Julianne’s a very strong personality. You totally buy that. She has the grit and resolve to contend with the things that are happening to her.”

Sweeney, best known for her roles on Euphoria and The White Lotus, was cast as Claire in part because she was able to deliver on the intensity of Claire’s emotions. “It’s kind of spooky how quickly she can get to a very raw emotional place when you call ‘action,’ and she’s just straight away exactly where the character needs to be. Which is often a very place of extreme emotional duress,” Pearce says. “Then you’d call cut and maybe change your lens, and she’s very light. You’d call ‘action’ again, and she’s straight there in a matter of seconds.”

We learn early in the film that Claire is an addict who has taken advantage of her mother in the past. Sweeney’s performance captures the volatility of addiction and the repercussions it can have on a family. “I’ve had a lot of family members deal with addiction and then struggle with similar issues as Claire and her friends, and her group that she hangs out with,” Sweeney says. “I’ve kind of had firsthand experience with it.”

While researching the role, Sweeney says she watched hundreds of YouTube videos of addicts interviewed on Skid Row, in Los Angeles. “I mean, there’s a manipulation underneath a lot of it,” she says. “But when there was love in the air in the room, you truly still felt it. The person that they are at the core, as buried as they might be, is still there.”

When Claire returns home, she brings some of the troubled characters in her life, including her boyfriend (Edmund Donovan) and a local criminal (Domnhall Gleeson). Kate must ultimately make some very hard decisions, pushing herself physically to save her daughter and the peaceful life she’d built for herself. “There’s a lot of action in this movie, but she’s an ordinary person,” Moore says of her character. “What she does is extraordinary because she’s faced with it, not because she is able to do this stuff. She just feels that she has to.”

Both Moore and Sweeney were tasked with learning new skills to shoot the project, which was filmed at a farm in New Jersey over six weeks. Sweeney had to learn horseback riding at the level of someone who had been doing it her whole life. “There was this horse there named Moose, and Moose and I became best friends,” she says. “I loved it. It made me want to have a farm and have a bunch of horses.” Moore had scenes that required her to dive into a lake, which were filmed at Pinewood Studios in London. “That was fascinating for me. You take this deep breath and then you go down there. They push you all the way down and you do all your acting,” she says. “It was definitely a challenge for me.”

For what sounds at first like a relatively isolated story set at a quiet farmhouse, Echo Valley winds up being bigger than you might expect: There are horses and diving, a dramatic set piece involving fire, and several fight scenes. Watching Moore and Sweeney during one of those passionate brawls was a highlight of the shoot for Pearce. “The way that she was screaming at Julianne, I thought she was going to burst her eardrum. It was so intense,” he says. “But as soon as we called ‘cut,’ they were just laughing. They were just so happy to get their teeth stuck into such a meaty scene.”

Echo Valley will leave audiences debating their own moral boundaries. Moore says the aim of the film is not to give answers, but to raise debates. “I’m kind of curious what the reaction will be,” she says. “There will be a sense, certainly, among parents going, like, ‘well, would I do that? How far would I go?’ You’re left with those questions.”