Hollywood Courted and Spurned Demi Moore. She Brings It All Out in ‘The Substance’

“When did you first feel cancelled by your age?”

You knew that some variation of this question would be asked — it was really just a question of when, and if it would come before the inevitable query about all that nudity. Seven minutes into the Cannes Film Festival press conference for The Substance, writer-director Coralie Fargeat’s extraordinary, extremely gory body-horror movie, a journalist asked the film’s star to talk about getting iced out of Hollywood for being a woman over the age of 40. The fact that the movie’s story revolves around an actress of a certain age feeling she has go to desperate lengths to remain forever young added an extra layer of self-consciousness to the proceedings. The fact that the person answering that question was Demi Moore multiplied the meta factor hundredfold.

“The real issue is how you’re relating to the issue,” Moore replied, with the poise of a diplomat. “What I loved in what Coralie wrote is that it’s about the male perspective of the idealized woman that we have bought into as [women]… Here, this newer, younger, better version gets an opportunity, and she repeats the same pattern. She’s still looking for external validation.”

For those who haven’t heard, The Substance concerns a former Oscar-winner and A-list superstar who reinvented herself as a TV exercise guru several decades ago. Thanks to her repellent caricature of a boss and a business obsessed with the bloom of youth, she is unceremoniously put out to pasture. A program designed to unlock the “newer, younger, better version” within her does exactly that, in the form of a dewy-skinned twentysomething (played by Margaret Qualley) that springs from the older woman’s body. The idea is to reclaim her space within the industry via a pretty doppelganger. It quickly gets ugly.

It’s an often sharp satire that still skews broad, swinging wildly even when it lands its punches. Part of what makes the movie work so beautifully, however, is the casting. Stars bring both baggage and a back catalog with them when they show up onscreen, with the glint of past roles and personal histories refracting from them like light through a diamond. Not for nothing is the lead named Elizabeth Sparkle. The fact that Moore plays the older actor might initially strike you as, at best, a wink-nudge commentary and, at worst, a cruel joke played at her expense. The movie can’t help being a bit of the former, yet it’s anything but the latter, even if you’re invited to see parallels between a fictional famous female cast out of paradise, a.k.a. Hollywood, and a real one who gradually allowed herself to step out of the frame.

So when you watch Sparkle face the rejection of a business that once feted her, and then resort to extreme measures to not feel irrelevant — measures which end up literally pitting her against herself — it’s possible to see a condensed history of the treatment of female movie stars from the silents to the streaming era. Plus ça change. What you also see is a young soap opera star who narrowly avoids becoming a self-admitted showbiz casualty; the raven-haired, raspy-voiced beauty of the suddenly omnipresent Brat Pack; one half of a celebrity couple left squinting in the ensuing spotlight; the artist who helps turn a decent supernatural romance into a genuine hit and sells a lot of pottery spinners in the process; a star who poses au naturel and pregnant on magazine covers; a famous person infamously dissected for her looks, her alleged “diva-like” attitude, and her $12.5 million salary (still less than her A-list male counterparts circa the mid-1990s); a former ingenue who staged a comeback by appearing in a bikini over the age of 40; and someone who, despite the fact that she still graces screens (see: 2019’s Corporate Animals), makes you feel as if they’ve gone into self-exile in order to survive.
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To look back on Moore’s incredible roller coaster of a career is to reckon with two basic components of the moviemaking business: sex and schadenfreude. From the start, she was cast as characters who doubled as the “idealized woman” (the object of 16-year-old photographer Jon Cryer’s desire in 1984’s No Small Affair) and/or were victims (the self-destructive Georgetown alum who’s narrowly saved from freezing to death in 1985’s St. Elmo’s Fire). The success of Ghost gave her clout, though magazine articles made sure to mention her debates with director Jerry Zucker and that “she’s a team player, but [there] are ideas that she does not prefer.” That’s from a 1991 Premiere cover story, the same one that mentions that she “exudes sex like a blond Mata Hari” while on the set of The Butcher’s Wife.

A few months later, Moore would be on the cover of Vanity Fair, showcasing a baby bump sans clothing and instantly making pop-culture history; the article focuses as much on her being “difficult” during productions and her marriage to Bruce Willis as it does the movie she’s promoting. The next year, she did a second VF cover and opted for a suit painted on her naked body in lieu of an actual outfit. Meanwhile, a pull quote from the piece’s author suggested that she “prefers to play tough, angry characters [and] doesn’t like to smile onscreen.” After starring in Indecent Proposal, i.e. the one where Robert Redford pays a million dollars to sleep with her, a writer for Esquire spends two-thirds of a “profile” story waxing poetic about offering her $500 for a kiss. It’s even worse than it sounds.

By the time Moore became the highest-paid actress of her day thanks to that $12.5 million paycheck for 1996’s Striptease, she had been labeled as difficult. Hence, her breaking of this particular glass ceiling was viewed less as a move toward gender equity and more as an example of professional overreach. “I understood that anybody who steps out first is going to take the hit,” she told Variety this year, right before The Substance opened. “The narrative quickly became ‘Well, she’s only getting paid that number because she’s playing a stripper.’ It hit me really hard.” When she pulled a 180-degree turn and played a female soldier in the man’s world of the military in G.I. Jane the next year, no one talked about her salary — they were too busy chattering about how she suppressed her femininity and shaved her head, in the most cynical ways imaginable. Going back to that Charlie Angels: Full Throttle sequence that kicked off a minor resurgence of “Demi’s back!” headlines in 2003: How many pieces and interviews do you think mentioned the way she brought a campy, ironic bent to a stock villain role? And how many do you think focused primarily on how bitchin’ her beach bod, for a woman her age, looked?

All of this percolates in the back of your mind when you watch The Substance. And though it’s easy to accuse Fargeat’s movie of hating both the player and the game in terms of chasing the eternal fountain of Tinseltown youth, it’s Moore’s complicated history with Hollywood and her body — something her 2019 memoir Inside Out digs into with gusto — that informs so much of Sparkle’s insecurity, her anxiety, her hope for a second chance and her rage at what’s ultimately a betrayal. Our relationship with this woman we’ve watched onscreen for decades is purposefully invoked in every scene of this body-horror film, and that’s before the VFX team starts to show you what happens when she reneges on the makeover program’s requirement to switch every seven days between Sparkle: Original Recipe and Sparkle: Extra-Crispy. The most unnerving sequence, however, doesn’t involve the grotesque use of deforming prosthetics or digital mutilation. It simply keeps the camera on Moore as she looks in the mirror, smearing makeup off her face she’s applied in last-ditch effort to appear attractive for a male suitor. The pain is so palpable you almost can’t watch it.

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Yet The Substance feels like a victory lap for Moore, because she’s finally gotten to a point where the digs about her being a diva, the necessity of primping and preening for some decision-maker in a designer suit, and the endless but-is-she-hot-enough handwringing is behind her. She may show a lot of skin in Fargeat’s film, but not because she’s trying to seduce anyone or secure her place in the filmmaking food chain. Moore has not been cancelled by her age — she’s become comfortable with it. That career-best performance Moore is giving in this scathing horror film is likely so vulnerable, so figuratively naked, because she revoked her membership in the showbiz club that demanded so much of her, then derided her for complying.

In fact, the key to understanding what she’s doing in The Substance may not be those early-to-mid-1990s roles at all. It may rest in another, far more brief appearance she makes in a 2024 movie. Hitting Hulu less than a month after Fargeat’s magnum opus premiered at Cannes, Brats follows filmmaker and fellow Brat Packer Andrew McCarthy as he tries to make sense of his involvement in that long-lost Eighties phenomenon. When he gets to his St. Elmo’s Fire costar’s house, which resembles a cross between a Zen retreat and a luxury spa, Moore lovingly greets him and reminisces about the craziness of it all. More than anything, she seems remarkably at peace with herself. You immediately get the sense that she has no need for making herself a celebrity commodity anymore. And it’s that sense of knowing who she is now is what undoubtedly allowed her to go to Sparkle’s dark places and let some light in.