Graham Moore (writer)

Graham Moore (born October 18, 1981) is an American filmmaker and author. He is best known his screenplay for the historical film The Imitation Game (2014), which topped the 2011 Black List and won the Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay.

Moore was born in Chicago, Illinois and raised on the city's north side. He is "the son of two lawyers who divorced and then married two other lawyers"; Moore's father, Gary Moore, is an insurance defense attorney and his mother, Susan Sher (née Steiner), works for the University of Chicago. His mother was formerly the City of Chicago's chief lawyer and First Lady Michelle Obama's chief of staff.

Moore's parents divorced when he was young. Moore's stepfather is Cook County Circuit Court Judge Neil Cohen. Raised Jewish, Moore graduated from the University of Chicago Laboratory Schools in 1999 and received a Bachelor of Arts degree in religious history in 2003 from Columbia University.

During his Academy Award acceptance speech in February 2015, Moore stated:

When I was 16 years old, I tried to kill myself because I felt weird and I felt different, and I felt like I did not belong. And now I'm standing here, and so I would like this moment to be for this kid out there who feels like she's weird or she's different or she doesn't fit in anywhere: Yes, you do. I promise you do. Stay weird, stay different

This led viewers to believe that Graham Moore was gay and highlighted his own experience as an LGBTQ youth. Many people praised the speech on Twitter comparing it to the openly gay screenwriter Dustin Lance Black who won an Oscar for Milk (2008). However, Moore has clarified to reporters he is in fact straight and not gay.

The speech has since drawn criticisms for his use of the word "weird" and for misleading audiences. J. Bryan Lowder of Slate wrote, "without harping on Moore's flustered speech too much, it's worth taking a moment to explain the trouble with that equivalence more generally and to think about why gay people might be so sensitive to it—especially coming as it did from the straight writer of a film that desperately marketed itself to audiences and Academy voters as a gay political statement." Ira Maddison III of BuzzFeed sharply criticized the language and vagueness of Moore's speech writing, "We don't need a straight, white male who wrote a straight-washed movie about Alan Turing as our savior. We need diverse women and men who are looking to the future, not people looking to past and crafting a speech that will appeal in its vagueness to anyone who's "weird.""

Moore lives in Los Angeles, California. He married a woman in 2019 and together they have a child.