Throughout her career, she has worked with a number of prolific directors including Martin Scorsese, Sidney Lumet, Ivan Reitman, Harold Ramis, James Mangold, and Richard Ayoade.

[3] When she was 18 years old, her friends urged her to enter a bathing-beauty contest at a local bar: So, I go in there, and my knees are shaking, and I'm breaking out in goose bumps 'cause I'm embarrassed and cold.

Her first role since Neighbors was in the British thriller film White of the Eye, in which Moriarty played the wife of David Keith's character.

Moriarty began the decade with major roles in the thriller film Burndown, Arnold Schwarzenegger's Kindergarten Cop and the soap opera parody Soapdish.

Moriarty played Lois opposite Debra Winger and Billy Crystal in the romantic comedy Forget Paris (1995), followed by the vindictive Carrigan Crittenden in the live action film Casper.

That year Moriarty also played opposite Angelina Jolie as Hedy Burress's mother in Foxfire, the film adaptation of Joyce Carol Oates' novel.

Moriarty played an FBI agent in Red Team, an abusive adoptive mother in the family film Prince of Central Park and a woman who fears death in Next Stop, Eternity.

In 2010, she returned to the big screen to play a bookie who sends two thugs to kill the main characters (Jennifer Aniston and Gerard Butler) in the romantic-action-comedy film The Bounty Hunter.

In 2013, she played Armand Assante's wife in Once Upon a Time in Brooklyn and a sarcastic waitress in the black comedy, The Double opposite Jesse Eisenberg and Mia Wasikowska.

Moriarty made an appearance as Michael Pitt's bitter, estranged mother in the crime drama Rob the Mob.

The same year she appeared as the co-owner of a house who shares a dark secret in Deborah Twiss's psychological thriller A Cry from Within[10] and the title character in Ante Novakovic's short film, Tammy, about a mother-son relationship which evolves over the course of a Sunday visit.

[12] Moriarty owns the Mulberry Street Pizzeria restaurant chain with co-owner Richie Palmer, to whom she was briefly engaged.

[13][14] Moriarty and Palmer continue to own Mulberry Street Pizzeria together, with four locations in Southern California and one in Las Vegas.