Demi Moore’s comeback narrative puts her in a prime position for Best Actress Oscar nomination – and maybe the win
When Kerry Washington announced Demi Moore as the Golden Globes winner for Best Comedy/Musical Actress on Sunday night, the crowd reacted in surprise jubilation — and that was before The Substance star brought the house down with the best acceptance speech of the night.
“I’ve been doing this a long time, like, over 45 years, and this is the first time I’ve ever won anything as an actor,” Moore, 61, said while holding the Golden Globe Award. “And I am just so humbled and so grateful. Thirty years ago, I had a producer tell me that I was a ‘popcorn actress,’ and at that time, I made that mean that this is not something I was allowed to have. That I could do movies that were successful and made a lot of money, but that I couldn’t be acknowledged, and I bought in and I believed that. That corroded me over time, to the point where I thought a few years ago that maybe this was it, maybe I was complete, maybe I had done what I was supposed to do. And as I was at kind of a low point, I had this magical, bold, courageous, out-of-the-box, absolutely bonkers script come across my desk called The Substance. And the universe told me that ‘you’re not done.’”
After she exited the stage, it was hard to think awards season was done with Moore either. Thanks to her conversation-changing moment in the spotlight, Moore — once the highest-paid star in Hollywood during her 1990s run of box-office success — sits in prime position to receive her first-ever Oscar nomination next week and could be lined up for the Best Actress win.
The comeback narrative
It’s a well-worn truism that Hollywood loves a comeback story, and that’s especially true with the Academy. In recent history, Renée Zellweger, Brendan Fraser, and Ke Huy Quan all won Oscars while their collective time away from the screen was a foundational pillar of their awards campaign.
Moore hadn’t disappeared before The Substance in the same way as Zellweger, who took a six-year break before her Oscar-winning Best Actress performance in Judy. The Ghost and A Few Good Men star appeared in several projects over the last decade, including the recent FX limited series Feud: Capote vs. the Swans. While The Substance is marching along on its unexpected awards run, Moore is also costarring in the Paramout+ series Landman.
But The Substance is her first significant lead role in a film in quite some time. Written and directed by Coralie Fargeat, the body horror satire is tailor-made for an actress of Moore’s stature. She stars as an aging Hollywood legend, Elisabeth Sparkle, a former Oscar winner who undergoes a risky treatment called The Substance that gives her a new lease on life — literally, in the form of a younger version of herself named Sue (Margaret Qualley) — with terrible consequences. Since its premiere at the Cannes Film Festival, where Fargeat won best screenplay honors, Moore has spoken about how she enjoyed re-engaging with her acting career because of the film’s challenging material.
“What I love is this was a rich, complex, demanding role that gave me an opportunity to really push myself outside of my comfort zone, and in the end to feel like I explored and grew not only as an actor, but as a person,” Moore told Indiewire at Cannes when asked what “doors” she hoped the project might open up for her following its release. “And so if there’s any hope, it’s really just to kind of re-engage in a way. I feel like I took a real step back for a long time and really questioned even whether or not this is what I should be doing. This was a part of waking myself up.” The interview’s headline? The Demi Moore Comeback Is Here with The Substance.
The overdue veteran finally getting her shot
Comeback story aside, Michelle Yeoh might be an even better comp for Moore’s current awards trajectory. During Yeoh’s awards run for Everything Everywhere All at Once, which ended with Yeoh winning Best Actress, the star frequently discussed how she had never had the kind of opportunity the emotional genre film afforded her.
“This is something we have been working so hard towards for a very long time,” Yeoh, then 60, said backstage after accepting her Oscar, the first time an actress of Asian descent had won the Best Actress award. “I’m still here today. Finally, after 40 years, I get this. … Don’t give up, because once you give up, that’s a loss. Don’t let anybody put you in a box, don’t let anybody say you are past your prime.”
Before her victory, Yeoh stressed that Everything Everywhere represented a high-risk endeavor and was an improbable success—especially since, historically, genre films have been challenging for the Academy to embrace, at least before Parasite in 2020.
“It was something so wild and wonderful and wacky,” she told Vanity Fair then. “On paper, when you read it, you go, ‘Hmm, either [the directors] the Daniels are certifiably insane, or if they’re not, I’m also in for a heck of a crazy ride.’”
It’s also a talking point Moore has shared, specifically highlighting the message of Fargeat’s cautionary tale.
“The script was such an interesting, out-of-the-box read, the way in which it was exploring the issue of aging. The thing that grabbed me was the exploration of the violence we can have against ourselves, that way in which we can dissect and criticize,” Moore said to The Hollywood Reporter during the outlet’s actress roundtable. “I have found, at least in my own experience in life, that it’s really not what anyone else has ever done to me. The impact has always been on what I do to myself, internalized.”
The “their time” narrative
No disrespect to her fellow Best Actress contenders — including relative newcomers Mikey Madison (Anora) and Karla Sofia Gascón (Emilia Pérez), acclaimed stage and screen actress Cynthia Erivo (Wicked), and Oscar winners Angelina Jolie (Maria) and Nicole Kidman (Babygirl) — but none reached the heights of fame that Moore did during her ’90s heyday. (As the New York Times noted last year, Moore’s famous Vanity Fair cover, where she was naked and pregnant and photographed by Annie Leibovitz, “broke the internet before there was the internet.”) That puts Moore’s Oscar campaign in another bracket, where major Hollywood stars like Julia Roberts, Sandra Bullock, Will Smith, and Robert Downey Jr. rode their status on the A-list to the Academy Awards stage for first-time wins.
Asked about her fame in that interview with the New York Times, Moore took a mannered approach. “Well, it’s interesting. Yesterday, my daughter Scout and I were going to a friend’s surprise birthday, and we were walking from the car where we parked, and out of nowhere, two guys [paparazzi] popped up. And the difference is now I don’t [feel] that I am under siege,” Moore said. “And that doesn’t mean I always like it. Like, did I like that they popped out of nowhere? But, you know, that’s the only part I can think of, of fame. Because I guess in general, I don’t think about it very much, actually.” Spoken like a true movie star.
The important subject
Yet, the most compelling narrative of Moore’s Oscar campaign may be The Substance. This film resonates powerfully within the industry, particularly among actresses, due to its portrayal of internalized misogyny. A memorable scene features Moore’s character refraining from a date as she struggles to accept her reflection in the mirror.
“It was such an intimate and raw portrayal of what we can do to ourselves, how we commit self-harm on a daily basis, sometimes without even touching our bodies,” Emilia Pérez Oscar contender and fellow Globes winner Zoe Saldaña told Moore of the sequence during the THR roundtable. “Even in the way that you were looking at yourself, you were so self-critical. And I just, I felt it.”
Amy Adams discussed the moment with Moore in a separate interview with Variety for the outlet’s Actors on Actors series. “I was watching it with my husband, and he was gasping at different parts of the body horror, which didn’t bother me. That bothered me,” Adams said. “I was like, ‘She’s going to hurt herself.’ It was so violent.”
“But such an important piece. That was this moment that she almost could have stepped out of the self-imposed prison,” Moore added, noting how universal the sense of doubt and feelings of self-hatred can be for women of any age. “And it’s also a moment that is the most anchored in, I think, our own humanness. I don’t know about you, but I’ve been in front of that mirror trying to make something a little better, only to make it worse. Where no amount of trying to change it on the outside is going to repair the wound that’s on the inside.”
So when Moore tied her Golden Globes win together with The Substance on Sunday night during her speech, it not only served as a reminder of how the grotesque places the movie goes are rooted in some very real truths — but a reason to cast a ballot in her direction in the future.
“I will just leave you with one thing that I think this movie is imparting. In those moments when we don’t think we are smart enough or pretty enough or skinny enough or successful enough, or basically just not enough, I had a woman say to me, ‘Just know you will never be enough, but you can know the value of your worth if you just put down the measuring stick,’” Moore said. “So today, I celebrate this as a marker of my wholeness and of the love that is driving me, and the gift of doing something I love and being reminded that I do belong.”
No one should be surprised if Moore gets some other reminders between now and the 97th annual Academy Awards on March 2.