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“I had hit that point of being a little bit — I don’t want to say defeated, because I wasn’t defeated, and I wasn’t even hopeless, but I was just kind of flat, neutral in a way,” Demi Moore says as she sits in her Beverly Hills home to record an episode of The Hollywood Reporter’s Awards Chatter podcast.
The 62-year-old, accompanied by her teacup chihuahua Pilaf, was speaking of the state of her career just before The Substance, the new Coralie Fargeat-directed film in which she gives the performance of a lifetime as a Hollywood star who is increasingly cast aside as she ages, and resorts to extreme measures to try to retain her youth and beauty.
“Then,” she continues, “I got a call from my agent saying, ‘There’s this script. It’s got a lot of interest. It’s definitely really different.’ He started to say something else and then said, “But you know what? I actually don’t want to say anything.’ And I realize now, what could he have said? He said, ‘I just think you should read it and see what you think.’ There was perhaps a little couching out of the sensitivity of dealing with aging. Everybody is different in their relationship to that and their own sensitivity to it; somebody might feel it hits too close to home. But for me, I was quite blown away when I read this.”
She emphasizes, “It really captivated me, the way in which it was exploring this subject of aging and, in particular, that violence that we can have against ourselves, the way in which we all — men and women alike — can dissect and criticize our own reflection. It just felt so relatable, on a human level. The other part of it was new territory for me — a body horror film. But as an actor, there were so many interesting challenges, not just the physical side of it, with the prosthetics, but the emotional rawness needing to be conveyed with very little dialogue.”
Moore, of course, has been a movie star — and a sex symbol — for 40 years. The New York Times once described her as someone whose early films, such as 1985’s St. Elmo’s Fire, 1990’s Ghost, 1992’s A Few Good Men, 1996’s Striptease and 1997’s G.I. Jane, “helped define the 1980s and ’90s.” She has also been nominated for an Emmy Award, a SAG Award and two Golden Globe awards. But she is only now, thanks to her performance in The Substance, beginning to be widely celebrated as a great actress, too. Indeed, her work in the film might well result in her first Oscar nomination.
Moore’s own journey through Hollywood has been something of a rollercoaster. Early on, she enjoyed a run of box-office topping blockbusters that has rarely been equaled. But after she became the first actress ever to be paid $12.5 million for a movie, Striptease, it seemed like she had something of a target on her back. “Anybody who’s first takes a hit,” she reasons.
After that, she received disproportionately bad reviews, and Razzies. Her mother died. She and her then-husband Bruce Willis split up and ultimately divorced. And she concluded that she needed to take time away from her career to focus on her three young children, with whom she moved to Idaho.
By the time she was ready to come back to acting some five years later, the ground beneath her career had shifted. As she once put it, “I looked too good to play older, and was not young enough to play the others.” She now elaborates, “I didn’t quite know where I fit or where I belonged,” adding, “I really did hit a point where I started to wonder, not like, ‘Is this over?’ But, ‘Is this actually complete? Have I done what I was supposed to do in this?’”
Elisabeth Sparkle, Moore’s character in The Substance, is forced to confront similar questions, and seeks a quick external fix. Moore says that she, thankfully, approached aging differently: “When we chase something out of the drive of all that we’re not, when we focus on that, then we can’t be celebrating all that we are.”
It’s not that she is immune to the same concerns that plague Sparkle, just that she has figured out how to grapple with them. “I looked at these compilation reels [montages highlighting her work at recent award ceremonies] going, ‘Oh wow, actually I was cute.’ But I can also look back and remember how critical I was, all the things that I found wrong with myself. So it’s something that is really a job that has to start from within.”
Moore’s life diverges from Sparkle’s in other important ways, too. “Elizabeth Sparkle and I are very different,” she emphasizes. “If you notice, she has no friends, she has no family, she has no balance in her life. Her entire reflection of value is only on the external. What I did relate to is not what was being done to her, but what she did to herself. Because again, I have experienced it in many different ways. It’s not that I don’t still experience it. The difference today is I have different tools. I have a different way of catching it and shifting it and knowing what’s real and what’s not real, and that the value of who I really am is not just my external self. I think that that is something that comes with chronological time on this earth. But that rejection and pain, out of a desire to seek some sense of perfection, I certainly understood.”
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