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Demi Moore’s most well-received role in years has been rewarding but also challenging on and off-screen.
In “The Substance,” Moore stars as Elisabeth, an actress who is unceremoniously fired from her fitness show at age 50, deemed too old to be desirable. In an attempt to continue her career, she uses a wonder drug that promises to generate a very literal younger version of herself, played by Margaret Qualley, though it comes with a bloody and brutal price.
“It was a very hard film, very raw, very vulnerable to make, but at the same time liberating,” Moore told The Guardian.
She continued, “I had less pressure than Margaret because she had the added pressure to look amazing. I degrade throughout [the movie], and I knew going in that I wasn’t going to be shot in the most glamorous way or with the edges softened; in fact, the opposite. But there was something freeing about that.”
Demi Moore called her role in the new horror film “The Substance” “raw” but “liberating.” (Jon Kopaloff/Getty Images)
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Moore and Qualley share a life and are meant to alternate who’s in charge every seven days, but Qualley’s younger version starts refusing to switch back, causing Moore’s version to degrade physically into something almost unrecognizable.
For the role, Moore donned grotesque prosthetics and even stripped down for some full-frontal nude scenes and experienced her own personal body horror during filming.
“To give you an idea of the intensity, my first week that I actually had off, where it was just Margaret [Qualley] working, I got shingles,” Moore told the Los Angeles Times. “And I then lost, like, 20 pounds.”
Committed to the part, Moore added, “You have to walk away feeling that you put it all on the table. It called for it, and it’s what you want to bring to it.”
Margaret Qualley and Moore play younger and older versions of the character who battle it out for control and approval in the spotlight. (Stephane Cardinale – Corbis/Corbis via Getty Images)
‘THE SUBSTANCE’ STAR DEMI MOORE BATTLED SHINGLES, LOST 20 POUNDS WHILE FILMING HORROR MOVIE
The extremes that Moore, and her character, go through exemplify the film’s themes of painfully trying to obtain perfection.
“What really struck me was the harsh violence against oneself. It’s not what’s being done to you, it’s what we do to ourselves,” she told The Guardian, adding that the movie had “a depth to the exploration of our psyches, our inner dialogue, that body horror seems to amplify”.
In an interview with the New York Times, she noted that the pressure to meet Hollywood and society’s beauty standards is “less overt” than in the film.
“It’s less overt and a little bit more of the unspoken perception that your desirability — there’s a line in the film that says your desirability as a woman is done with your fertility, which for me, again, it’s a perception that’s been bought into, but it doesn’t make it the truth,” she said.
“What really struck me was the harsh violence against oneself. It’s not what’s being done to you, it’s what we do to ourselves,” Moore said about “The Substance.” (Getty Images)
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The 61-year-old has been working in Hollywood for decades, struggling with her own body image despite making headlines and earning millions by baring her body for audiences.
She rose to fame in the ’80s with films like “St. Elmo’s Fire,” going on to become a box office draw with films like “Ghost,” “A Few Good Men” and “Indecent Proposal.”
In her 2019 memoir, “Inside Out,” Moore reflected on the ways she tried to control and maintain a perfect body early in her career with exercise, disordered eating and drugs and alcohol.
“I think there was a general sense about certain expectations, in particular coming out of the ’80s and the ’90s where there was a greater pressure for perfection. If you look at any advertising, everything was very clean and perfect, and there wasn’t any body inclusivity. There was a more extreme standard of beauty that existed, and I did, as I wrote in the book, personally experience being told to lose weight on quite a few films before I ever even had my children,” Moore told the New York Times in her interview about “The Substance.”
Moore said there was “greater pressure” in the ‘80s and ’90s about meeting a certain beauty standard. (Getty Images)
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She continued, “And again, those were humiliating experiences, but the true violence was what I was doing to myself, the way in which I tortured myself, did extreme crazy exercise, weighed and measured my food because I was putting all of my value of who I was into how my body was, how it looked and giving other people’s opinion more power than myself.”
In a recent interview with Variety, Moore said the insecurities she felt led her to take on racy roles, including 1996’s “Striptease” and posing nude on the cover of Vanity Fair.
Moore said she “tortured myself” trying to stay slim. ( Kristy Sparow/Getty Images)
“One of the biggest misconceptions about me is that I loved my body,” Moore told the outlet.
She continued, “The reality is, so much of it was me calling in certain projects that would give me an opportunity to help me overcome insecurities about my body.”
Moore said that “One of the biggest misconceptions about me is that I loved my body” when it comes to some of her past roles, like the movie “Striptease.” (Earl Gibson III/Penske Media via Getty Images)
‘THE SUBSTANCE’ STAR DEMI MOORE SAYS ‘INSECURITIES ABOUT MY BODY’ LED HER TO TAKE ON RACY ROLES
“It was the same with the Vanity Fair covers; it was not that I loved it, it was about trying to free myself from the space of enslavement that I had put myself in,” the “Ghost” star added.
With “Striptease” and later “G.I. Jane,” Moore was the highest-paid actress in Hollywood, but the films were both critical and commercial failures, marking the beginning of a decline in her career.
“… with ‘Striptease,’ it was as if I had betrayed women, and with ‘G.I. Jane,’ it was as if I had betrayed men. But I think the interesting piece is that when I became the highest-paid actress — why is it that, at that moment, the choice was to bring me down?” Moore told the New York Times.
She continued, “I don’t take this personally. I think anyone who had been in the position that was the first to get that kind of equality of pay would probably have taken a hit. But because I did a film that was dealing with the world of stripping and the body, I was extremely shamed.”
Moore said she was “shamed” for taking her role in “Striptease.” (ALAMY)
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The focus on Moore’s body continued into the millennium, when she appeared in “Charlie’s Angels 2: Full Throttle” in a bikini at age 40.
“I had done‘Charlie’s Angels,’ and there was a lot of conversation around this scene in a bikini, and it was all very heightened, a lot of talk about how I looked. And then I found that there didn’t seem to be a place for me. I didn’t feel like I didn’t belong. It’s more like I felt that feeling of, I’m not 20, I’m not 30, but I wasn’t yet what they perceived as a mother,”she told Interview Magazine.
Moore’s career continued but without the same level of success as before. But she doesn’t consider “The Substance” a comeback.
“It’s not like I’ve really left to come back,” she told The Guardian. She added that she did wonder at one point if the acting part of her life was “not ended but, like, was it ‘complete?’”
Moore said that after she’d appeared in “Charlie’s Angles: Full Throttle,” she found “that there didn’t seem to be a place for me. I didn’t feel like I didn’t belong” in Hollywood. (Nathan Congleton/NBC via Getty Images)
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With “The Substance,” Moore has earned rave reviews, and the film had a five-minute standing ovation after its premiere at the Cannes Film Festival in May.
Reflecting on her feelings on aging after making the film, Moore told Variety, “It’s not hugely different before and after. But it gave me a greater appreciation for myself as I am.”
“One of the biggest themes of my career is challenging preconceived ideas and limitations. I’m at a point where I’m writing my own story, as opposed to my story being dictated to me based on my age,” she continued. “Who says somebody can’t look a certain way or do certain things? Your 60s is not what your 60s used to be. There’s a part of me that’s enjoying figuring it out as I go along.”
Moore is shown with her daughters, Scout LaRue Willis, Tallulah Willis and Rumer Willis, at the Los Angeles premiere of “The Substance.” (Chad Salvador/Variety via Getty Images)
She later told “Today,” “To me, this is the most exciting time of my life. It is. I feel like my children are grown, I have the most independence and autonomy to really redefine where I want to go. I don’t know what that looks like or where it is, but I’m just excited to be living in it.”
“The Substance” is in theaters now.
