The baby in the corner is driving Carrie-Anne Moss to distraction. Dressed casually in jeans and a thin grey sweater, the 40-year-old actress keeps glancing across the café's back patio, squinting her pale blue eyes for a better look. He is bundled up despite the warmth of the Santa Monica morning; his mother fusses over him while her friend rocks the stroller and coos. Moss is cooing, too. "That baby's just killing me," she says more than once, shaking her head.
When the women get up to leave, Moss leans forward and calls to them. "Your baby is gorgeous! He reminds me so much of both my boys." The mother thanks her, then confesses her son is suffering from a little flatulence. Before long, the conversation ambles easily around the relative merits of beer (good for breast milk) and cayenne pepper (bad for gas). The trio take off and Moss sighs. "Babies are so delicious it's ridiculous."
Moss, born in Vancouver, first set tongues wagging as the leather-clad, ass-kicking Trinity in the phenomenon The Matrix. Nine years and two sequels later, she has settled comfortably into a softer role: wife to the Canadian actor Steven Roy and mother to two young sons, aged four and two. (Mindful of her privacy, Moss reveals few details of her marriage and has never released the names of her children to the media.) This new domesticity has spilled over into her working life, as well. Though she accepts parts less frequently, Moss appeared recently as a housewife in the Canadian comedy Fido - filmed while she was seven months pregnant - and as a mother in both the independent drama Normal and the hit thriller Disturbia.
This year, she'll play wife to a fellow Canadian, Ryan Reynolds, in Fireflies in the Garden, an ensemble drama that stars Julia Roberts and Willem Dafoe as Reynolds's highly dysfunctional parents. "The script really moved me and made me go hug my kids while they were sleeping and breathe all over them and never want to let them go," she recalls with a laugh. "That's when I knew I had to do it."
Onscreen and off, motherhood remains at the forefront of Moss's mind. She confesses that whenever she meets people with older children, she asks them if they wish they'd had one more. "We'll be out for dinner and I'll ask strangers," she says, pantomiming her husband's mortified expression. The response has been unanimous: Moss has yet to meet anyone who's said no.
Actually, one person said no: her own mother. "But she's the only one!" Moss insists. Barbara Moss had a son when she was 17, then Carrie-Anne at the age of 20. Divorced when the children were still young, she raised the pair in Vancouver largely on her own, working as a legal secretary. Moss seldom saw her father. "When I think of my childhood, I think of my mother, whereas my kids are going to be thinking of both their parents," she says. "They have a father who is very present."
Moss developed an early and passionate devotion to becoming an actress. She enrolled in modelling class, joined a children's musical theatre group and wallpapered her bedroom with photos of Brooke Shields and Lauren Hutton. She and her best friend dreamed endlessly about their graduation from high school, when they'd hop into a convertible - dressed all in white - and drive down the Pacific Coast Highway toward Malibu and guaranteed fame.
Instead, Moss moved to Toronto. She began modelling professionally, working as far away as Japan before settling in Spain. While in Barcelona, she booked a TV series, Dark Justice, which relocated to Los Angeles for its second season. When the show was cancelled, the 24-year-old began to flounder. She moved home to Vancouver, but left after just a few days; she returned to L.A., but promptly broke up with her boyfriend. Moss found herself occupying the spare room of her new manager's ex-husband's house - don't ask - an unusual arrangement that she maintained for more than six months.
