Demi Moore never thought this would happen. When the nominations were announced for the 2025 Oscars this morning, the 62-year-old found herself among the Best Actress nominees for the first time in a career that has spanned five decades.
“Being nominated for an Oscar is an incredible honor and these last few months have been beyond my wildest dreams,” she said in a statement. “Truly there are no words to fully express my joy and overwhelming gratitude for this recognition. Not only for me but for what this film represents.”
Moore’s performance as a fading celebrity seeking to return to her youth by any means in Coralie Fargeat’s The Substance has earned her the best reviews of her career, but there’s no way she was thinking “Oscar bait” when she first read the script for the gory, provocative body horror. “On paper, this could have been a disaster,” she told The Independent last year. By that point in her career, she had already been conditioned to think that the acclaim of Hollywood’s highest echelons was beyond her grasp.
“Thirty years ago, I had a producer tell me that I was a ‘popcorn actress,’” Moore recalled when she accepted a Golden Globe, the first major honor of her career, earlier this month. “And at that time, I made that mean that this wasn’t something that I was allowed to have. That I could do movies that were successful that made a lot of money, but that I couldn’t be acknowledged. And I bought in and I believed that.”
Moore, who grew up in Roswell, New Mexico, was catapulted to fame first as a soap star on General Hospital in 1982 and then in a string of films alongside the 1980s “Brat Pack,” including St Elmo’s Fire and About Last Night..., opposite Rob Lowe. By 1990 she had established herself as one of the most bankable stars in the movie business thanks to her role in supernatural romance Ghost, the highest-grossing film of the year. Her hot streak continued with A Few Good Men, Indecent Proposal and Disclosure, and in 1996 she became the highest-paid actress in film history when she received an unprecedented $12.5 million paycheck to star in the crime comedy Striptease.
For all her success, she was haunted by the “popcorn actress” tag that, as she said at the Globes, “corroded me over time.” She was a pop culture phenomenon, married to fellow box office star Bruce Willis and appearing on a much-discussed cover of Vanity Fair in 1991 while nude and seven months pregnant, but she had come to believe she’d never be truly accepted or venerated for her craft. By the end of the decade, her star already seemed to be waning, with films like The Scarlet Letter and GI Jane underperforming with audiences and critics alike.
In her best-selling 2019 memoir Inside Out, Moore reflected on the highs and lows of her long journey to self-acceptance. “I got here because I needed all of this to become who I am now,” she wrote. “I had been holding on to so many misconceptions about myself all my life: that I wasn’t valuable, that I didn’t deserve to be anywhere good, whether that meant in a loving relationship on my own terms, or in a great film with actors I respected who knew what they were doing. The narrative I believed was that I was unworthy and contaminated. And it wasn’t true.”
In The Substance, Moore proves just how untrue that narrative was. While the more grotesque sequences and “extreme” special effects have made headlines, one of the most affecting and powerful scenes in the film simply positions Moore in front of a mirror, applying and reapplying make-up as she grows increasingly frustrated and distraught. It is a haunting, fearless performance that conveys a mess of complex, fraught emotions without Moore needing to utter a single word. It is the work of an actor, underrated for almost half a century, demanding to be taken seriously.
