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A shadow has fallen across Demi Moore’s face. We’re in a hotel room in London that’s been converted into a makeshift press junket, and the big, black poster for her new film The Substance is wreaking havoc with the lighting. Flustered men, who probably had pictures of the star on their bedroom walls decades ago, swirl around her with tool belts and boxes. The woman in question is unbothered. “It’s just reflecting,” Moore tells one of the men, between sips of water from an enormous tumbler. She points to a pile of camera detritus in front of her. “If we put it in front of the pole just there, but behind the sign, it’ll absorb the light.” The man, far too awed to even think of challenging her, does exactly what he is told. A shuffle, a switch and a loud clang later, the shadows are gone. Moore takes another sip of her water.
The 61-year-old, it should be said, didn’t ask for and certainly doesn’t need artificial lighting. This is a woman who was built in a movie star factory 40 years ago, giving her an almost supernatural ability to appear lit from within. It also lends her a slight uncanniness. Moore has always been so famous, so photographed and so debated – and that’s before we even mention culture-rattling work such as Ghost, Indecent Proposal and A Few Good Men – that you’re forced to do a double take in her presence. Yes, it is her, you find yourself thinking. My god… it’s actually, really her.
The French filmmaker Coralie Fargeat knew she needed a woman like Moore for The Substance to work: someone who hasn’t just known fame intimately, but someone who could accurately embody its fickleness. Few can speak better to the dizzying highs and lows of celebrity than Moore, whose body, sex life and sky-high salaries have long been about as talked-about as her movies. “I had to find an actress who symbolises stardom,” Fargeat says. “Someone who knows what it’s like to receive love from the people who look at you, but who also knows what it’s like to lose those eyes.”
In a very metatextual bit of casting, Moore plays Elizabeth, a fading movie star and fitness guru who is dropped from her hit workout show after turning 50. Desperate, she agrees to take part in a surreal experiment: if she injects herself with the mystery toxin of the film’s title, a younger, shinier version of herself (who names herself Sue and is played by an eerily poreless Margaret Qualley) will quite literally hatch from her body.
The experiment requires both women to trade places every seven days, but the agreement between them rapidly breaks down. Sue craves more of the attention and success that’s inevitably foisted upon her. Elizabeth, meanwhile, begins to physically erode. The result is one of 2024’s biggest cinematic conversation-starters, a gloopy, grimy, day-glo flesh-fest; Eric Prydz’s “Call on Me” video with added intestines and skin rot. I’ve seen it twice now and am still unsure whether it’s actually any good – but its sheer ambition is undeniable, along with the haunting brilliance of its two central performances.
“On paper, this could have been a disaster,” Moore tells me with a laugh. She is dressed in a knee-length polka dot dress, her hair pitch-black, her face taut yet warm. Next to her is 29-year-old Qualley, dressed in a cyborgian leather one-piece. Moore speaks huskily and briskly, talking around many of the obvious parallels between herself and Elizabeth. Qualley, of Netflix’s Maid and memorable supporting turns in Poor Things and Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood, is the quieter of the two, possibly because she’s jet-lagged, possibly because The Substance – both in content and in conversation about it – feels very much like The Demi Show. Still, the pair were a united front while making the film.
I walked away from ‘The Substance’ with a certain sense of liberation within myself
“We created a real sense of safety,” Moore remembers. “Even when we weren’t in scenes together, we were often together on the set – there was comfort in knowing we had each other.” When it comes to nudity, The Substance isn’t Moore nor Qualley’s first time at the rodeo, but here their nude scenes feel particularly frank and exposing: Qualley is asked to play a character who happily participates in her own sexual exploitation, while Moore’s nude scenes are arrestingly clinical. At one point she stands in front of her bathroom mirror under garish white lights, poking hatefully at her sixtysomething flesh. Well, Hollywood sixtysomething, anyway. “It’s not a glamour role,” Moore says. “I knew going in that I had to be vulnerable and raw.” She and Qualley look at one another, appreciatively. “We kind of held each other’s hands as we walked through the fire,” Qualley adds.
Moore has been deservedly lauded for her work in The Substance – New York magazine dubbed it “the best performance of her career”. But it’s also not as radical a departure as some corners of the media insist it is. Yes, many of Moore’s most famous roles have been nakedly commercial endeavours, but risk has been baked into far more of her career than you might at first think. Remember the (unfairly) lambasted GI Jane, in which she shaved her head and underwent arduous military training? Or how she followed up the elegant fantasy of Ghost by playing a blue-collar murderess in Mortal Thoughts? Remember how she almost admirably miscast herself in an adaptation of The Scarlet Letter? At the peak of her Nineties fame, Moore regularly chose parts that were ballsy and dangerous, parts that – whether they worked or not – consistently put a target on her back.
“She’s been doing things like this her whole career,” Qualley says. “But to me, GI Jane is just the ultimate.” Moore herself is reluctant to look back and complain. “Perhaps everything has to find its right time?” she suggests. “But GI Jane certainly was not appreciated, and it actually really holds up if you watch it today.”
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Fargeat admits that she didn’t realise the extent of Moore’s trailblazing until she read her 2019 memoir, Inside Out. “She was very feminist and ahead of her time and made really bold choices,” she says. “It was a whole side of her personality that I didn’t know. She has that iconic status, but also this toughness, this risky state of mind.”
That said, she didn’t anticipate that Moore would be interested in the role. “When her name was first suggested for it, I doubted she would ever want to do it. I knew it would be something quite sensitive for an actress. I’m asking someone to confront their own phobias, you know?”
“I felt like it found me,” says Moore, who has a slight tendency to speak in opaque, therapeutic terms. “I’m not Elizabeth, but I could find pieces of her that connected with me, and I knew that if I tried her on for a few months and went on this journey with her, it would lead to something greater for myself.”
Fargeat thinks that Moore was fated to make The Substance at this particular moment in time. Inside Out saw Moore write about, in often heartbreaking detail, her childhood sexual abuse, her struggles with addiction and the pain of divorce in the spotlight – she was married to Bruce Willis, with whom she has three daughters, from 1987 to 2000, and then Ashton Kutcher from 2005 to 2013. “She’s gone through so much, and has done a lot of work on herself to overcome the violence of [her past] and feel good about herself again. She’s gained the strength to confront all of those things.”
If Inside Out was an exorcism of Moore’s history, then The Substance is an arresting step into her possible future. For a start, it’s drawing her Oscar buzz – a first for her. But she also thinks it’s helped her in other ways, too. Some of the most painful segments of Inside Out saw Moore writing about her own body, her experiences of disordered eating, and how she spent much of her major movie career fixated on her weight. Working on The Substance, though, felt different.
“I walked away from it with a certain sense of liberation within myself,” Moore says. “I knew there were going to be shots that highlighted my flaws, but those allowed me to find acceptance and appreciation in myself.” She shakes her head. “It was about surrendering. I had to let go of any parts of me that value perfection.”
How is that process going, I ask. “It’s ongoing,” she laughs, softly. “But I’m getting better.”
I believe her. She really didn’t seem to care about those shadows.
‘The Substance’ is in cinemas from 20 September
