Demi Moore is Getting Her Long Awaited Hollywood Reassessment

By Kayleigh Donaldson | Celebrity | September 27, 2024 |

By Kayleigh Donaldson | Celebrity | September 27, 2024 |

When you read the reviews for The Substance, Coralie Fargeat’s giddily grotesque body horror, you’ll see a lot of rave write-ups for its star, Demi Moore. And rightfully so. Moore gives a brilliant performance as Elisabeth Sparkle, a former movie star turned fitness guru who partakes in a radical experiment of visceral results. It’s a go-for-broke turn of intense physicality, one of equal parts camp and tragedy. Truly, it’s a testament to how good Moore is in the role that she’s getting awards buzz for a role where she, well, I can’t tell you what she does because of spoilers, and this is a film you HAVE to see in a crowded theatre.

The reviews also repeat a lot of the same phrases, particularly the word ‘brave.’ Oh, it’s so brave of Moore to do this kind of role, one where she’s so vulnerable and throws herself so forcefully into a truly wild task. She bares all, both physically and emotionally. There is bravery on display here, the kind of rawness and commitment that’s almost hypnotic to watch. But there’s an obvious hint of condescension to it, right? Oh bless, well done Demi for doing something so unlike you, and at your age! It was always easy to dismiss Demi Moore, even when she was one of the most famous women on the planet.

Throughout the late ’80s and early ’90s, Moore was omnipresent, having reached a level of famous and scrutinized that’s easy to downplay. She had married Bruce Willis in 1987, a year before Die Hard made him a mega-star. In 1990, she was the leading lady in Ghost, the highest-grossing film of that year, and she was soon earning bigger and bigger paydays for each subsequent role. In 1991, when she was pregnant with her second child, she posed for the cover of Vanity Fair in an image that is now truly iconic: seven months pregnant, totally nude (except for some big diamonds), and impeccably glamorous. Every pregnant celebrity poses like this now, but at the time, people accused Moore of perversion. Some stores would only sell copies of the magazine in a brown paper bag, akin to how pornos were sold.

In 1996, Moore received $12.5 million to star in Striptease, making her the highest-paid actress in the business. This payday inspired many paragraphs of scorn from entertainment executives speaking anonymously to the trades. Many insisted she didn’t ‘deserve’ that kind of money, even though she had more than a few commercial smashes to her name. Her acting talents were frequently criticized, as was her seeming eagerness to get named for roles, as if the directors were begging her to not strip for the camera. She was a frequent target of the Razzies, an organization that is never knowingly nice to women. While not every performance was great and there were more than a few duds in her back catalogue (shout out to everyone who watched The Scarlet Letter and wrote their high school reports on the movie instead of the book), she more than held her own in meatier roles.

Ridley Scott’s G.I. Jane might be her best pre-Substance performance. She plays a soldier who becomes a guinea pig in a public experiment as to whether or not women are tough enough to join the Navy SEALs. Moore got extremely buff and shaved her head for the part, but it’s her furious steeliness that makes the performance as she fights her way through a system that is forcing her to strip away every iota of her femininity to keep up with the most toxic version of masculinity.

G.I. Jane commercially underperformed and was largely talked about through discourse of Moore’s body. Indeed, her career has been heavily defined by conversations about her looks, both adoring and scolding. In her excellent memoir Inside Out, Moore gets candid about the unbearable pressures she felt to maintain her body and fight off the insults that critics and executives often flung her way. For Indecent Proposal, where she plays a woman who a hot rich dude pays $1 million to sleep with, she worked out endlessly to get ready. Adrian Lyne, the film’s director, then chastised her for getting skinny and declared, ‘You look like a f*cking man.’

The Moore body fetish reached its zenith/nadir when, at the haggard age of 40, she starred in Charlie’s Angels: Full Throttle and dared to wear a bikini. I have a shockingly clear memory of when that film was released and the wall-to-wall coverage of Moore’s ‘middle-aged comeback.’ Coupled with her new romance with Ashton Kutcher, a man 15 years her junior, Moore was positioned as an uber-hot but ‘desperate’ cougar who was furiously trying to keep up with the younger generations. There were exceedingly detailed articles speculating on all the plastic surgery she may have had, including incredulous claims that she’d had a ‘knee lift’, something that haunted me as a teen. In an industry where 35-year-old women are set for Driving Miss Daisy roles, the ageism that permeated Moore’s career felt especially potent.

Moore’s work in recent years has been largely that of supporting roles in quirky indies or glamorous ensemble pieces. One of my personal favourites is Please Baby Please, the surreal musical satire about gender roles and the malleability of desire. Moore is the perfect kind of camp grand dame in a film all about the artifice of the male/female binary. In the second season of Feud, she played the most fragile and maligned of Truman Capote’s so-called swans, a woman forced into the margins of society and treated like a puppet in Capote’s outlandish stories. It’s become exciting to see her pop up in unexpected projects.

And The Substance felt like the most unexpected of all, yet the meta element of her presence is undeniable. What better way to establish this new era of your career, one of reassessment and reclamation, than through a role that’s all about how women are taught to loathe themselves? The most tragic scene in The Substance comes when Elisabeth, hoping to regain some of her self-confidence, prepares to go on a date with a nerdy guy from her youth. She looks incredible, but every time she stares herself down in the mirror, she sees yet another flaw to fix. Eventually, the hatred of her own reflection is so overwhelming that she can’t face leaving the house. All she sees are flaws, signs of her aged visage that everyone has told her is long past its prime. In a film that is often ridiculous and bloodily chaotic, this indelibly human moment is what lingers. Moore’s performance in The Substance feels like a giant f*ck you to decades of scrutiny over her looks, age, and perceived worth.

Up next on Moore’s schedule is a Taylor Sheridan series, because apparently working with that man is the Hollywood equivalent of doing community service. Certainly, the success of The Substance will bolster interest in future Moore projects (and hopefully get her in front of some interesting directors who can give her a meaty role.) It’s always a good thing to see women who were derided by the entertainment industry get their dues, and Demi Moore’s return brings with it an undeniable degree of satisfaction. That and it’s delightfully gross!