Demi Moore’s new movie, “The Substance,” which opens Sept. 20, is a dark comedy about the horrors of getting older as a woman in Hollywood. But it’s also a literal body-horror film — the basic premise is that Moore’s character, an aging actress-turned-celebrity-fitness-instructor named Elisabeth Sparkle, takes a strange elixir (the substance) that allows her to create a younger, more perfect version of herself. And you see that creation in bloody, visceral detail. The movie kind of grossed me out, to be honest, but I couldn’t stop thinking about it afterward. And it was fascinating to see Moore, who has been open about her own struggles with her body image and has lived most of her life in the public eye, play this role.
I’ve been mesmerized by Moore for decades, starting in 1985 with “St. Elmo’s Fire,” when her husky voice and bold onscreen persona — in this instance, a kind of wildness that made her seem both alluring and destructive — first broke through. There was a period when it felt as if every movie Moore starred in was an event — “Ghost,” “A Few Good Men,” “G.I. Jane,” “Striptease,” “Indecent Proposal.” She eventually became the highest-paid actress in Hollywood, and also an early advocate for pay equity in the industry, long before the issue was part of the national discourse.
But even though Moore was such a visible celebrity of my teenage and early adult years, I never felt I knew much about her until reading her revealing 2019 memoir, “Inside Out,” which opens at the lowest point in her life, with the end of her marriage to Ashton Kutcher and her relapse into alcoholism. Moore’s struggles started early as the child of a mentally ill, alcoholic mother. But much of the book is about the extreme lengths she went to during her prime Hollywood days to control her body through disordered eating and exercise. Now in her 60s and a grandmother, Moore tells me she has finally grown comfortable in her own skin and, with “The Substance” and this stage of her career, is hoping to upend expectations about what it means to be an aging woman in an industry that both embraced and judged her harshly. (And a note: I asked Moore how her former husband Bruce Willis, who’s living with frontotemporal dementia, is doing, and she said he’s stable and OK, all things considered.)
Why did you sign on to star in a movie about a woman who’s aging in Hollywood and at war with her own body? It felt very meta watching you do this. Why it was easy for me to step in and do this is because I don’t feel I am her. This is a woman who has no family — she’s dedicated her entire life to her career, and when that’s taken, what does she have? And so, in a way, I had enough separation from her, and at the same time, a deep, internal connection to the pain that she was experiencing, the rejection that she felt. I knew it would be challenging, but potentially a really important exploration of the issue.
Tell me what you understand the issue to be. That it’s not about what’s being done to us — it’s what we do to ourselves. It’s the violence we have against ourselves. The lack of love and self-acceptance, and that within the story, we have this male perspective of the idealized woman that I feel we as women have bought into.
The movie starts with your character sitting down with a male executive and being told that when you turn 50, it’s over. Is that something that you heard a lot working in Hollywood? I feel like it’s less overt. 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.
You’re naked in a lot of the film. And I was thinking about what it meant for you to be so exposed now in your 60s as opposed to your 20s. You’re playing with Margaret Qualley, who is supposed to be this goddess, the younger version of you, and I was wondering, are you more comfortable now, less comfortable? Going into this, I knew this is not about me looking great, and in fact there was a certain liberation in the role that wasn’t having to be perfect. It’s not that there aren’t shots in it where I go, “Ugh, my ass looks awful” [laughs], but I’m also OK with it. Part of what was interesting is that Elisabeth is being rejected, and it’s not that I look that bad.
You look unbelievably fantastic. But you can see that you’re not 20. Exactly.
And they make it a really big feature of the film. You get close-ups of Margaret’s body, and I don’t know how old she is. Twenty-something.
And she looks it! So you’re seeing it in comparison. What were you thinking when you saw that? It goes back again to that male perspective of the idealized woman. The one that’s being rejected because the ass isn’t as plump and as high and as tight, and this other that’s being celebrated. And I guess in looking at it outside of the first kneejerk of “Ugh, I didn’t love my butt,” I felt more proud of the power between showing the two: the vulnerable part and the part that has yet to experience. She’s newly born. She doesn’t know yet what life is. So the question is: Would you trade your wisdom for a tight ass?
Where do you land on that question? I would like to not have to choose! [laughs] I think part of the liberation of doing this film was realizing that I’m here to define who I am at almost 62, and I don’t need to play by any rules that have existed up until now, and I don’t know what that is because I haven’t been here before. I remember long, long ago, hearing in passing that at a certain age you shouldn’t have long hair, and I think unconsciously, there was a part of me that didn’t buy into that, that said, “Well, who made that rule?” Just because that’s how it’s been, that doesn’t mean that’s how it has to be.
Your memoir came out five years ago. I’m wondering what it feels like now that it’s been out in the world for a while, to have revealed so much of yourself. I was very thoughtful about what I shared, because there’s a lot more life that’s lived than is in the book, and I think for me, the personal catharsis was in really exploring the essential question that I had, which is “How did I get here?” Coming from where I came from, on paper, the life that I’ve lived —
Growing up poor with an extremely dysfunctional, unstable household? Yeah, no education, no guidance, no safety net, on my own at 16, and the places I’ve been, the people I’ve met, the opportunities of things I’ve experienced, it was like: “How did I get here? Wow.” And then the other part is that I start the book with my life really having exploded, and so then the question was, “How the [expletive] did I get here?” Looking at the parallel of those two things allowed me to be able to really see the gifts within all of the challenges that occurred, and it gave me a deep compassion for my mother, because I thought, If I can’t find compassion for my mother, an innocent being who came into the world just as we all do, how can I expect my children to have compassion for me? For my failings?
That very difficult relationship with your mother, who was an alcoholic and — bipolar.
Yes. And this very difficult upbringing that you had, it did send you on this journey of trying to control your body in different ways, through disordered eating, through excessive exercise, through drugs and alcohol. When you were starting out in the industry, it must have been pretty common to have those issues? 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. 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.
When did you realize that was having such an enormous effect on you? After I finished “G.I. Jane” is when I had a huge shift, because I had manipulated my body, I had changed it multiple times, through just pure force and discipline, and when I finished that film, I was so kind of worn down in this battle that I had been in that I finally surrendered. And I feel like I just started to ask to be my natural size because I didn’t know what it was. I literally couldn’t go in a gym. I couldn’t control food in that way, and I really experienced the gift of surrender.
Was part of that to do with the fact that you had transformed yourself so much for that “G.I. Jane” role and it had not been well received? You were getting a lot of criticism. It was coming off the back of “Striptease” as well — that it just kind of turned off that spigot, that you were like, “I’m not going to listen to this anymore”? Even before any of that happened, I think that I truly was physically worn down. I finished that film with a shaved head, and I was 138 pounds, and for me, that’s a lot. And on a personal level, not too long after I finished, my mother was dying, my relationship was starting to kind of disintegrate, and so I think it was all just mounting. It was like I needed all of that happening at once to get me to the point of letting go.
At this point, you were one of the most famous women in the world. There was a lot of interest in your personal life, your marriage to Bruce and this sense that you were being too well paid, you were too powerful, you were too much. Well, 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? 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.
At that moment, your husband Bruce was getting paid a huge amount of money for doing films. Did you compare yourself to him? It wasn’t about comparing myself to him. Yes, I saw what he got paid. It was really more about: “Why shouldn’t I? If I’m doing the same amount of work, why shouldn’t I?” And it’s no different than when I did the cover for Vanity Fair pregnant. I didn’t understand why it was such a big deal, why women when they were pregnant needed to be hidden? Why is it that we have to deny that we had sex? That’s the fear, right, that if you show your belly, that means, oh, my gosh, you’ve had sex.
This is the Vanity Fair cover shot of you naked and pregnant by Annie Leibovitz that broke the internet before there was the internet. There are these moments throughout your life and your career where your physical self has been really pushing the boundaries, but you were feeling terrible about yourself? I think that’s one of the misconceptions, this idea of, “Oh, I love my body so much,” versus what the truth was: that these things were coming along, obviously I was choosing them, but I think it was all in service of helping me try to overcome my issues, like my self-loathing, my feeling of not being enough. To help build my confidence, not because I was confident.
It’s kind of like a fake it ’til you make it approach. That is my primary university. [laughs]
In all these different ways, you were ahead of the culture. You were an early champion of pay equity. You were an early champion of sex positivity. And the other thing we haven’t really talked about is sobriety. I’m someone who has been a year and a half sober myself. Congratulations.
And I was wondering if you’d talk about your sobriety journey, if you feel comfortable. Yeah, within reason. I’m so grateful to be sober, most importantly, because it’s given me emotional sobriety.
Oh, explain what you mean by that. Well, I think everyone understands the idea of being sober from drugs, alcohol, sex, shopping, those kinds of externalized things, but what it is to be emotionally sober means how I’m choosing to live my life, the quality of how I interact with people, my ability to show up for others. That’s all within my emotional sobriety. It’s also, when you have emotional sobriety, all the things that are used to medicate, and it’s not just drugs and alcohol, there’s many things —
Food. Food. When you no longer have that kneejerk to numb yourself out, yes, life can be a little edgy, but now I know I can go into a room, a gathering, and if I’m uncomfortable, I don’t need to try to take the edge off it. I can actually just go: “Oh, wow. Isn’t that interesting? I’m a little uncomfortable right now.”
Reading about how you became sober, which was during “St. Elmo’s Fire,” and the director basically having an intervention and saying, “You have to go do this”: Lots of people who’ve struggled with addiction have had those moments, but you kind of stuck with it. Why do you think that was? At that time, I remember being sent to this place, and they wanted to check me in for treatment, and me saying, “Well, I can’t, because I’m going to start a film.” And they said, “What’s more important to you, the film or your life?” And I said, “The film.” Because that was my only sense of self and value. And so the incredible gift, like I really feel like it was divine intervention, is that them sticking their neck out for me to stay in the film, under the circumstances, gave me something more than me. It was my fear of losing this thing that I was pursuing that really meant everything at that moment. And I think it really kept me sober. But I want to clarify, just so I’m being transparent: I did step out. I had almost 20 years of sobriety. I had a detour. And now I have over 12 years.
Was it hard to get sober again? I think when you have that much time and you open the door, it’s difficult, because there’s a part of you that feels like you want to prove that you can manage it. And managing it, it is just not in my makeup. But I sure gave it a hell of a shot.
So, there have been reports of a “St. Elmo’s Fire” reboot. True? There are some discussions, yes. It’s kind of early, early stages, but from my understanding, pretty much everyone from the original cast is in or at least open and interested, which, you know, it would be really fun. When Andrew McCarthy just did the documentary [“Brats”], I was in New York and went to the screening and sat on a panel. Ally Sheedy was there, and there’s just something about our shared experience. I hadn’t seen her probably in, I don’t know, almost 30 years. And that was crazy. But yet, the feeling I had when I saw her, I felt my heart expand, because I think we were all just so young, and it was kind of exciting, this shift that was occurring in our industry of films being made about things that were happening in our lives. So I think it would be really fun.
You know, at this point, you’ve been famous for decades. What is your relationship to fame now? Well, it’s interesting. Yesterday, my daughter Scout and I were going to a friend’s surprise birthday, and we were walking from the car where we parked, and out of nowhere, two guys [paparazzi] popped up. And the difference is now I don’t [feel] that I am under siege. And that doesn’t mean I always like it. Like, did I like that they popped out of nowhere? But, you know, that’s the only part I can think of, of fame. Because I guess in general, I don’t think about it very much, actually.
This interview has been edited and condensed from two conversations. Listen to and follow “The Interview” on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, iHeartRadio, Amazon Music or the New York Times Audio app.
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