It’s been 25 years since Julianne Moore and Ralph Fiennes starred in The End of the Affair, Neil Jordan’s drama about a torrid extramarital affair set during and after World War II. The film was critically acclaimed and nominated for two Oscars (cinematography and best actress for Moore). It showcased both leads’ powerhouse acting, from their tingling chemistry to their ability to deliver the most gut-wrenching emotion with a simple look.

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Since then, both have gone on to deliver decades of incredible performances—Moore in films such as Far From Heaven, The Hours, Still Alice, and May December; and Fiennes in The Constant Gardener, The Reader, the Harry Potter series, and A Bigger Splash. They have also stayed in touch over the years, even though they have not yet worked together again.

Just days before reuniting for Vanity Fair at Moore’s home, they ran into each other on the street in New York. Fiennes had just come out of a screening of Queer (“I was all jangling because…it’s amazing, but, well, it’s intense”) and noticed Moore walking on the street with her family. He called out to her. “She momentarily looked a little bit like, Who is this? Should I walk on? Should I ignore?” he says with a laugh. They agreed to meet soon for a coffee—which they’re now having at Moore’s house as they participate in this installment of Reunited.

There’s a lot to talk about. This year Fiennes starred in the compelling papal drama Conclave as a cardinal tasked with coordinating the election of a new pope; his latest film, The Return, a retelling of Homer's Odyssey, just hit theaters on December 6. Moore, meanwhile, starred opposite Tilda Swinton in Pedro Almodóvar’s first English-language feature, The Room Next Door, playing a woman whose close friend is dying of cancer.

The pair have an easy warmth as they reveal memories from working together, what makes acting in a different accent so tough, and the joy they find in their chosen profession.

Vanity Fair: Do you remember the first time you met?

Ralph Fiennes: I remember because I met Julianne at the after-closing-night party of the run of Hamlet that I did. It was ’95. It was on a boat, and I was already a bit in awe of her and admiring of her. It was quite a party, I have to say.

Julianne Moore: And also I ended up in your car! I didn’t even know him, but the party was insane.

Fiennes: It was an insane party because it was a company of actors having done Hamlet for three and a half months. We’re all going crazy.

And when did you meet up again for The End of the Affair?

Moore: It was a screen test. What I remember is that there were several actresses screen-testing, and we all wore the same trench coat because Neil [Jordan] wanted us costumed. I think I was the last one to test. And when I put my hands in the pockets, there were all these Kleenexes in there because all the other actresses had been crying so much. And I didn’t cry at all in my audition! I was thinking I didn’t get it. I was sure because I didn’t cry. I was so scared. I was terrified. I think also being American—that was hard.

Fiennes: But I feel the same if I have to do American. It’s a big challenge.

Moore: Certainly, when you’re the outsider in that culture, donning that accent and being in that world, you really feel like a fraud. It’s really hard. I worked with a young girl this summer who’s Australian, and her American accent was excellent. And then they would change lines and she’d kind of freak out. I said, “Your accent is so good that no one remembers you’re working in an accent.” But that’s a hard thing to do.

Fiennes: It was an intense relationship in the film—adulterous love and quite heated, quite physical moments and lots of love scenes. But I just remember feeling the best kind of comfort level—not complacency, but just ease.

Moore: I felt very much like we could match each other all the time, just in terms of how we like to work and where our energies were. I think we had a mutual understanding of that relationship and the intensity of it. I remember Neil saying that there’s something about Ralph—you can see it in Conclave too. He’s so alive in his face, so incredibly alive and present. I was standing next to Neil, and he was doing a scene where he had to come into my character’s house, and there was a shot on him as he turned around and looked back. Neil was like, “Look at that, look at that face. Oh my God, look at his face, his eyes.”

Fiennes: I watch your face in many films where you have this kind of translucent quality that we see into your soul, and you have this extraordinary sort of ability to be skinless, which I find special and beautiful.

Moore: Thanks.

Fiennes: I remember we laughed a lot.

Moore: I like to laugh when I work, and luckily Ralph does too. I can remember it was a train scene, a montage. I’m supposed to be leaning into [you], and I think we spent the entire time whispering about agents or something like that. Or it would be like, “And then I had a sandwich, I had a salad”—it would be that kind of stuff, because you just try to keep it alive.

Do you remember where you were in your career trajectories at the time?

Fiennes: I was having a slightly up-and-down moment. I had done this big turkey: The Avengers, which was the turkey of all turkeys. They didn’t even have a premiere. They didn’t even have screenings. They just said, “Put it out and then shut your eyes.” And so I was literally thinking, as you do if that comes your way, Oh, my career is over. This was a fantastic sort of antidote to the anxiety of what’s going to happen post-Avengers. I love [End of the Affair] author Graham Green. I love his warped characters and questions of morality. I just love him as an author. And so this came up, and it completely was the stuff I love in terms of English literature.

Moore: I had just had a baby. During the ’80s, I did a lot of television and I did a lot of off Broadway. My film career didn’t really start until the early ’90s, and then it started happening really fast because of independent film. So there was this kind of surge of stuff. But when I got the script for End of the Affair, I was desperate for it. I loved it. I flipped out. I wrote Neil a letter saying, “Please test me for this.” And I was the only American who was being tested, so I really felt like it was a long shot. When I came, actually, it was the first time I left [my son], and I left him for 24 hours, because I was nursing. So it was like I pumped everything, flew, turned around, came right back.

And though you’ve never worked together again, you’ve stayed in touch?

Moore: Well, Ralph has an apartment in New York.

Fiennes: I remember we’ve sometimes met for a coffee when Julianne lived in the West Village, which is where I have my apartment. And then, actually, we had a lovely trip together. I was going to play Robert Moses in the play here about two years ago, and it was before I started in London. I wanted to do a trip to Jones Beach, which is the beach he created. It was made available to the public because of Moses’s vision. And so my research trip was to come stay at my place and take a car out, and I invited Julianne.

Moore: We had a really fun day.

Fiennes: I was so cold. And we walked on the beach and we had lunch in a little diner, and I have the happiest memory of that day. She listened to my lines and she gave me notes on my act.

Moore: Because he was working on his Robert Moses voice, and it helps. I remember even when we were doing End of the Affair, I didn’t have a dialect coach on the set. I would probably insist on it now, but then I was like, “Okay, fine.” So sometimes if I would be off, it’d be Ralph who’d say—

Fiennes: You were never off. But it’s interesting how it was the class. It wasn’t the accent. It was the little nuances.

Moore: So just sometimes a word. I was watching something on television the other day, and the character said, “I did something a touch.” You can tell there weren’t any Americans there, because it was like we’d say “a little bit.” But it was all British people who had made it.

Both The Return and The Room Next Door depend on a close collaboration with your costars. Julianne, a lot of people were surprised that you’d never worked with Tilda Swinton before.

Moore: She’s great. And she’s someone who I very much admired. I always loved her choices. I loved her work. I liked how she is in the world, everything about her. And it was one of those things, too, where we did form a partnership, and the friendship that we developed happened in real time on the set. So you do all the same things that you do with a girlfriend when you meet them, where you’d start talking about where you live and what your kids are like, and what you’re doing next summer and your relationship and your friends from high school, and you start sharing stuff. So we actually built our relationship personally as the characters were reconnecting as well. One of the things I love that she says, too, is that she’s very interested in fellowship. She’s interested in community. And I think that that’s a sense that you can have on a film set and with other actors and with other creators. And that’s one of the things that brings me back to it again and again.

Ralph, you’d worked with Juliette Binoche many years ago. What was it like stepping back into a familiar collaboration?

Fiennes: We’ve stayed very, very good friends over the years. We’ve been to see each other in the theater. She’s a wonderful stage actress. And she’s come to see me. And if I go to Paris, I’ll often have lunch with her, have dinner. When this came up, she loved the script and it just made complete sense, and I think she understood it. It’s sort of mythic. And on set, she moves me. She moves me a lot.

Ralph, did you shoot The Return and Conclave close together?

Fiennes: Yes. It was a bit nerve-racking because I had to grow a beard as Odysseus, and so I was very obsessed with Conclave finishing on time to allow me [to do that]. I thought I needed a minimum of two months to get any decent kind of beard.

Moore: So you could just concentrate on hair growing.

Fiennes: That’s all I focused on, hair growing and getting ripped.

Moore: I can’t wait to see this. You had little weights in your dressing room at The End of the Affair.

Fiennes: I did?

Moore: You did. I’m friends with John Lithgow, Stanley Tucci, and Ralph, and I was working on an English television show at the time, so we sent photos back and forth of them as cardinals and me and my Jacobean matron outfit. Remember that? It was so funny.

I assume part of the reason to say yes to things like Conclave and The Room Next Door is the director. Can you talk a little bit about their styles of directing?

Moore: That’s why I chose to do this. This was Pedro’s first English-language full-length feature. He’s someone who has such an original voice, and when he burst onto the scene with Matador and then Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown, I think all of America sat up. And I watched his films avidly, and he would sometimes flirt with the idea of making a film in English, but then Pedro would always back away. So when this came my way, it was a complete and utter surprise. I was thrilled to be asked. He has such a unique voice. Edu Grau was our cinematographer, and was working with Pedro for the first time too, and he said, “We are all here because of the way this man sees the world.”

He has kind of a dreamlike way of seeing the world. I’m always really interested in point of view. People talk about how directors are different. They’re not different. What they share is a strong point of view—that’s the most important thing.

Fiennes: How does he communicate on set?

Moore: He likes to rehearse. He’s very specific about it, but the rehearsal is really for him to go through his language. So he’s working out that stuff. And he tends to give a lot of direction. There was some voice-over and he started to say something, and I said, “Just let me try and then you can tell me afterwards.” And he goes, “And then I realized maybe I don’t have to give so much direction.”

Fiennes: With [Conclave director] Edward [Berger], I had seen [Patrick Melrose], the series with Benedict Cumberbatch, which was great. And I liked the script a lot. I had not seen All Quiet on the Western Front when I met him. I had a great meeting. I was drawn to it immediately. And on set, it was just easy. He’s so prepared, but he doesn’t carry his preparedness in front of him like a shopping list of things to do. He just is light: “Well, maybe, Stanley, maybe you’re there, and Ralph is here. What do you think?” His character’s very open, so the set feels very comfortable. So it’s just being in the presence of a kind of intelligence where you just go, I know I’m in good hands here.

How would you say you’ve changed since 1999, when you worked together?

Fiennes: I’d like to think that one’s more open to the moment. I think often when I was younger, there’s something to get right, or there’s a place to arrive at, which is the truth. But there’re all kinds of truths. Like, the camera might read something completely different. So I feel much more like, Well, okay, let’s try. And a kind of joy in trying different stuff.

With Wes Anderson, who I love to bits—but we know from his films, they’re very precisely arranged and you have to buy into that choreography. And on Grand Budapest Hotel, I had to learn to accept that choreography, and I loved it. But there was one day when I had quite an important emotional speech, and he had designed it so I moved from a specific place [to] three different points within this speech. As I was doing it, my brain was worrying about getting to that place in the speech and it didn’t feel right. What I said is, “Please, I just need to be in one place and just say it. And that’s what I feel.” And he very sweetly said, “Okay, no, we’ll put you here.” This is a story about not being right or wrong, but just saying to the director, “I really feel it has to be this way.” But mostly I like to think one can be fluid and open to what’s going on and with the other actor.

Moore: The thing that I’m realizing is that I just want to feel as free as possible when I’m working. You do all your preparation, and then you leave it behind and you let it happen to you on camera. That feeling of freedom and play—that’s so important to remember. I find this tremendous amount of joy in it. Often when people talk about acting, they talk about how hard it is and how brave we are and all this kind of stuff. And I’m like, Is it really? I think it’s joyful. It can be joyful. It’s about human expression, about being alive, and the freedom that you can feel there.

Fiennes: I think what can trap you initially is, obviously, we’re all subject to anxieties, fears, fears of failure. Those are the things that imprison you. If you can get to the place where you have done the work, you are free to play and respond, it’s great. And if you have the right director just guiding you. You’re right, you want to be open for the moment when the camera’s running. I think film often really likes unexpected little spasms of energy, little things that are not planned at all.

Moore: Sometimes I’ve done stuff on camera that I don’t remember doing. Somebody will mention it to me, or I’ll see it and I’ll go, I didn’t make a choice to do that. So that’s what’s fun—that something came over you.

Is there any role that you loved so much that you wouldn’t mind doing it again?

Fiennes: I played Antony in Antony and Cleopatra onstage, and I think that’s a wonderful play and an amazing, amazing part.

Moore: I don’t know that I have one. I’m sometimes, with characters, sad to see them go. There are characters who I really enjoy their energy, the way they feel, the way my body feels, and what I'm thinking about and what I’m relating to. And so I’m sad.

Fiennes: It’s a bit like the end of the relationship.

Moore: And then there’s some characters that I want to leave behind where their energy is so negative; it’s so dark that I’m just like, I need to be finished with this cow and move on.