This story is part of the 2025 TIME100. Read Ryan Murphy’s tribute to Demi Moore here.
Here’s what you already know: at the 2025 Oscars, Demi Moore—the favorite for Best Actress, for her performance in The Substance—lost the award to Anora star Mikey Madison. It was a surprising result in an awards season that saw Moore win at the Golden Globes, the Screen Actors Guild Awards, and the Critics’ Choice Awards. You already know that this was a heartbreaking finish for a woman who was at the center of Hollywood in the ’90s but never received this level of acclaim. And, if you saw Coralie Fargeat’s body-horror fable, you know how thoroughly Moore embodied the character of Elisabeth Sparkle, an actress turned television fitness instructor who loathed her aging body so much that she resorted to using an ominous treatment to create a younger, “better” version of herself—Margaret Qualley’s Sue. You saw the tension in Moore’s jaw when Madison’s name was called and recognized that losing this most important award to a 25-year-old starlet must have stung—the very dynamic of The Substance brought to life.
But what you don’t know is this: Moore put her money on Madison. Three weeks after the Oscars, and after a brief vacation to decompress, Moore is cozy in a sweatshirt and glasses at her home in Idaho, her 1 1/2-lb. Chihuahua Pilaf resting beside her on an ivory couch. Reflecting on that night over Zoom, Moore says that during the commercial break right before the Best Actress announcement, she was hit with a premonition. “I leaned over and whispered to my manager, ‘I think it’s going to Mikey.’” So when the big moment arrived and her name wasn’t called, she felt like it only confirmed what she already knew. “I don’t know why I knew, but I did,” Moore says. “I was so centered and calm. I didn’t feel gutted. I didn’t feel any of those kinds of things. I just trusted, and am in trust of, whatever is going to unfold.”
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Which is a way of talking about a loss—gracious, flattering—that a publicist might script. But Moore’s apparent acceptance of the way her awards season ended rings true, because it’s how she talks about every hard thing in her life. She is a person who has been through hell multiple times—through a difficult childhood, a rape by a man her mother invited into their home, addiction, infidelity, three divorces, tabloid cruelty, and a midlife relapse and temporary estrangement from her daughters—and she’s developed a way of understanding the world that allows her to take blows in stride. She wrote about it in her 2019 memoir, Inside Out; she spoke about it to Andrew McCarthy when they reunited for his 2024 documentary Brats, a movie that examined the damaging effects of the “Brat Pack” label; she’s applying it now. Moore’s philosophy is that all of life’s events happen for us, rather than to us. Sure, she can admit that losing sucks. “The physical, human part that has ego, of course, has disappointment,” she says. “It certainly would have been wonderful to have won.” But she believes there’s something in this loss that she’s meant to take and move forward with. The way Moore sees it, a door that would feel closed if she’d won—a story complete—has been left open. She just needs to walk through it.
Moore, now 62, has always been a trailblazer. As a member of the so-called Brat Pack, with roles in St. Elmo’s Fire and About Last Night, she was part of a wave of films that put the perspectives of young people front and center, ushering in a cultural shift. After establishing herself as a commercially successful star in movies like Ghost and Indecent Proposal, Moore asked for a paycheck commensurate with that of her male peers and, with a $12.5 million deal for the 1996 movie Striptease, became the highest-paid woman in Hollywood. Though she was still making less than Bruce Willis, her husband at the time, the media saddled her with the nickname “Gimme Moore.” To this day, she describes the label as “very hurtful” and “quite damaging” in terms of her professional reputation.
“There are women now who have broken a $20 million-per-movie salary, and it’s not on the front page of anything,” says Gwyneth Paltrow, a close friend of Moore’s who, a decade behind in age, at first idolized Moore from afar. “They always say when you’re first through the thicket, you get all the scratches. She was that person.”
Offscreen, Moore created a media sensation with a Vanity Fair cover, where she was photographed nude, embracing her pregnant body—a shocking image by 1991 standards. At 40, her body again became the subject of headlines when she dared to wear a bikini onscreen in Charlie’s Angels: Full Throttle, defying notions of what a woman “should” look like at her age. The same year, she made a statement about the meaning of family by appearing on a red carpet with Willis, their three daughters, and her much-younger then-boyfriend, Ashton Kutcher. Though Moore was more often gawked at or judged than she was applauded for pushing the boundaries, looking back, her impact is clear. She helped trigger cultural debates that still roil us: pay equity, objectification and body acceptance, the politics of motherhood, even age-gap romances. “Historically, whether I’ve chosen this or it’s just been part of my story in this lifetime, it seems that I have always been part of challenging certain status quo,” Moore says.
Paltrow says Moore brought “Wall Street energy” to the way she approached the business in her early career. “It was a kind of movie stardom we hadn’t seen for a woman before,” she says. “Look at Julia Roberts, look at Sandy Bullock, all the way to today, to Margot Robbie—she cut a path for women to be remunerated properly for their work.”
Now, Moore’s work on The Substance has brought to the fore conversations about how society devalues women with age. The moment in the movie that people can’t stop talking about is not one of the jump scares or gross-out shots. It’s a scene with Moore alone in front of a mirror. Elisabeth, grasping for a reminder of her worth now that she’s seen the way people fawn over Sue’s youth and beauty, makes a date with a former schoolmate. In the bathroom when it’s time to go, she paints red lipstick onto her mouth, a finishing touch. But the presence of Sue, unconscious and glowing nearby, haunts her. Elisabeth returns to the mirror, adds some blush to her cheeks. Gloss on her lips. She’s nearly out the door when she turns back. Maybe a scarf to cover the skin on her chest. Some concealer to brighten and smooth her complexion. More blush to bring her cheeks to life. With each new adjustment, she gets more aggressive, until she’s clawing at her face, rubbing her skin raw. The scene ends with her hunched on the edge of her bed in the dark, her phone pinging with messages from her date. If every horror movie has a moment when the audience screams at the protagonist not to walk into that dark basement, for The Substance, this is it. The viewer knows that Elisabeth is beautiful and worthy—the horror lies in the violence she inflicts on herself because she can no longer see it.
“There is a really interesting aspect to redefining how we see women in their 60s—what that really means, and the limitations that have been imposed upon us societally, but even more importantly, what we’ve imposed on ourselves,” Moore says. She knows the world wants women to think of themselves as less vital as they age, but she insists it doesn’t have to be this way. “In fact, this is an incredibly powerful, exciting, and alive time.”
That Moore would have a platform to engage in these conversations at all was hardly a given. After a tumultuous upbringing across multiple states, she left the Los Angeles home she shared with her mother at 16. At 19, she was cast in the soap opera General Hospital, at 20 she booked the role of Michael Caine’s daughter in Blame It on Rio, and at 21 came St. Elmo’s Fire. By then she was addicted to cocaine. She got clean during the production of Elmo, thanks to studio executive Craig Baumgarten and director Joel Schumacher, who required her to attend a truncated rehab program then work with a counselor throughout filming. To Moore, this was a moment of divine intervention from the universe: if she hadn’t had the movie to fight for, she might not have gotten clean.
In the span of just seven years in the ’90s, she starred in Ghost, A Few Good Men, Indecent Proposal, Disclosure, The Scarlet Letter, Striptease, G.I. Jane, and more. Success gave her the opportunity to reframe the traumas and challenges of the way she grew up. Would being raised in a more nurturing, reliable family have been nice, and would it have helped her develop better self-esteem? Maybe, she says. But it also might have kept her content, lacking the motivation to make a better life on her own. “While I may not have realized that as I was in survival mode, I can really see I have a certain strength and drive and determination, and I had, as a very young person with no safety net, a willingness to take risks because I had nothing to lose,” she says. “It’s given me things that, if I look back, I wouldn’t change.”
Making The Substance showed Moore how far she’s come in other ways too. In Inside Out, she wrote candidly about the ways she tried to control her body throughout her career, striving to create a physical form that would make herself feel comfortable being seen on camera. While nursing her second child, she exercised so intensely to prepare for the military uniform she’d be wearing in A Few Good Men that her daughter’s growth was stunted. Now she’s taken every opportunity to share the message of the film, one she believes deeply: that what’s most damaging is not the shame or expectations that other people put on us, but the decision we make to let those forces shape how we see ourselves.
Onstage accepting the best actress award at the Golden Globes, Moore shared a story about a producer who once told her she was merely a “popcorn actress,” the kind of performer who could draw a crowd but would never be taken seriously as an artist. The way she looks back on that comment now is not with anger or resentment toward the person who said it, but with recognition that it was her own choice to believe him. “I gave a portion of my power away, thereby I did close possible opportunities. I limited myself,” she says.
Moore’s friend Jamie Lee Curtis watched her accept awards and walk red carpets for The Substance with a sense of pride that hit close to home. “I know what it feels like to all of a sudden have people pay attention to the same work I’ve been doing since I was 19,” says Curtis, who won an Oscar for her role in Everything Everywhere All at Once at 64. “It was beautiful to watch because she also showed up. She did not shrink from it—this bitch threw down. She came to play.”
Though Moore has been working consistently for more than four decades, she has spent the past two playing less prominent roles. Now, with the success of The Substance, the phone is ringing more, and she and her team are thinking through the best path forward. “To go from the beginning of this last year feeling like I was never part of the conversation to being acknowledged in a critical way for my work has just allowed me to open up my belief in greater possibilities,” she says.
Moore is hesitant at first to say what she hopes the future will look like, aside from working with great directors, great writers, and great actors. “I’m always careful about not projecting too much into the future. That doesn’t mean that I’m excluding having goals or desires. It’s just to keep me staying present,” she says. She does, however, throw out one thing, hoping it might stick. She’d like to do an “irreverent, slightly absurd” action film with Michelle Yeoh, whom she bonded with while they promoted their films. Cynthia Erivo, another actor she’s gotten to know this year, and Gwendoline Christie would also be welcome on this ride.
In the meantime, shooting the second season of Taylor Sheridan and Christian Wallace’s Landman for the next few months will buy her some time. And she recently filmed Boots Riley’s I Love Boosters, billed as an sci-fi adventure comedy about a shoplifting crew targeting a “cutthroat fashion maven,” Moore’s character. “Demi just picks cool things she wants to be involved in,” Riley says, adding that his films are not the type that big Hollywood agents push their A-list clients to do. Her participation “makes this probably a bigger film,” he says, “because people know she’s back and they recognize the kinds of choices she’s making. They trust her.”
The Boosters ensemble primarily comprises actors in their 30s, like LaKeith Stanfield and Keke Palmer. “Some of the other actors on set pride themselves on being crazy—and she’d one-up them in their banter and improv,” Riley says. “She’ll go there. She’s just an artist in that way.”
She can do this not only because she’s Demi Moore and she’s always had range, even if the depth of her talent was not recognized, but also because she’s learned enough to embrace the moment, whatever might be in front of her. “That’s the beautiful thing when you really open up to how the universe really works, as opposed to gripping so tight, trying to force things to happen,” she says. “You really move with the flow.”
She may not have gotten the storybook ending to her Oscar campaign, but as Paltrow points out, “She’s still going.” What Moore knows now, that her character in The Substance never comes to understand, is that with age comes wisdom, and with experience comes confidence, and a woman in the second half of her life is brimming with possibility.
Styled by Brad Goreski; set design by Gille Mills; hair by Hos; make-up by Kara Yoshimoto Bua; production by Petty Cash
On the cover:
Suit by Victoria Beckham, shoes by Christian Louboutin, earrings by De Beers
On the inside:
Top and shorts by Dolce & Gabbana; shoes by Nina Ricci; ring and earrings by De Beers and Boucheron
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