Demi Moore stars in one of the goriest, most daring films ever nominated for an Oscar, the feminist body-horror parody “The Substance.” Moore, 62, melts and mutates onscreen in frequently horrific ways, appearing naked and in extreme close-up. She could not be more self-actualized about it.
Moore described the part as “wrestling with flashes of my own insecurity and ego.” “I was being asked to share those things that I don’t necessarily want people to see.”
She was chatting in a video interview last week, dressed casually in black and wearing large spectacles, twisting and tucking her legs beneath her on her office couch with every thought. Filming despite the difficulty was a “gift — silver lining, blessing, whatever you want to call it,” she said. “What else is there once you’ve spoken everything? There is nothing to conceal. “Being able to let go was another level of liberation for me.” The next night, she received the Critics Choice Award for Best Actress.
Her career and cultural rebirth are long overdue, according to Ryan Murphy, the showrunner and friend who persuaded her to join with him in last year’s “Feud: Capote vs. The Swans.” He described her as having the beauty and aura of an old-school movie star, with the professional discipline to match, but the flexibility of a seeker: “Game to do anything,” he stated. “She is a pioneer. We all discuss what she has done for the business and for other women.”
He went on to say, “She is one of the most emotionally intelligent people you will ever meet.” When I have an emotional difficulty or need counsel, I go to her rather than my shrink.”
Moore is also the front-runner for best actress at the Oscars for her role in “The Substance,” as Elisabeth Sparkle, a former A-lister turned TV fitness teacher who is unjustly thrown out to pasture for the Hollywood sin of being over the age of fifty. Her desperate answer is to inject herself with the mystery potion referred to in the film’s title, giving birth to a more young self named Sue (Margaret Qualley) via a gaping gash in her spine. They are intended to switch every week, while the others remain vegetative. However, in the struggle for nubile skin — and consequently appeal – Elisabeth loses horribly.
It has largely stirred discussion because of its not-so-subtle message. Moore’s one-of-a-kind portrayal, which also relies on her real-life background as a sex icon whose shape was both revered and reviled, is more than simply a metaphor. It is enthrallingly tactile, a marvel of wordless emotional scope: She has no conversation, seldom appears onscreen with a co-star (at least while both are aware), and communicates mostly through close shots, frequently looking at her own reflection — “which is really not the most comfortable place to be,” Moore said. “We look for what’s wrong.”
The prosthetics that transform her into a wizened creature “were their own mixed bag of tricks,” she continued, as was working out the logic and regulations, because it’s also a world that doesn’t exist. Like, “OK, I’m in this completely aged, degraded body.”
She stated that she wasn’t even convinced the film would work until it premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in May (it won best script). Moore was instantly memorable, in unexpected ways: her rich voice is one of her hallmarks.
In an email, Qualley praised her co-star. “Demi is the magic blend of deep consideration and the ability to courageously live in the present,” she told me.
Moore said the production, which lasted five and a half months in France, was also one of the most physically demanding of her 40-year career. “G.I. Jane,” the 1997 Ridley Scott action movie in which she buffed up to portray a Navy S.E.A.L.-esque recruit, “was physically very challenging,” Moore says, but it was pretty straightforward. Every day, I was emotionally and physically exhausted. “Even the most simple scenes.”
And yet, it was the jump she craved, after pulling back from acting sporadically over the years: first, just after her peak in the 1990s, to raise the three girls she has with her ex-husband, Bruce Willis; and then to assess herself.
Along with a newfound focus on recovery, this era produced her frank, best-selling 2019 book, “Inside Out.” Among many other traumas, she describes her years of excessive eating and overexercising, which included locking her refrigerator.
Moore was not given the part of “Substance”; Fargeat examined other women, and the decision was finalized after a half-dozen meetings between the two. Moore handed out a copy of her book at one of these interactions. Moore said it was a plain-on-the-page vehicle to illustrate how much Fargeat’s narrative connected with her—and, she said, “not from a place of wound, but from a place that actually had healing.”
Moore was not interested in arguing over who was to blame. “Look, women being marginalized at a certain age, particularly in the entertainment industry, is the least-new information of the entire movie,” she told the audience.
She wasn’t only emphasizing “that painful state that I think we’ve all experienced, because we’re human, which is of compare and despair.” Her interest in the script sprang from the way those urges were aggressively directed inward. “Because I can look and say there is nothing that anyone else has done to me, that is worse than what I have done to myself.”
