Demi Moore wins her first major acting award at the Golden Globes 2025

The roar that shook the Golden Globes when Demi Moore took the stage could probably be heard across state lines.

No one, including Moore, seemed to have the 62-year-old pegged to win best performance by a female actor in a motion picture — musical or comedy, let alone for “The Substance.”

“I’ve been doing this for 45 years, and this is the first time I’ve ever won anything as an actor,” she said.

For months, pundits have been underestimating Moore and the film, a stylish body horror comedy from French director Coralie Fargeat that many thought was too gory to be seen as anything but a pretty great genre flick.

Moore plays an aging Hollywood star (and host of a long-running jazzercise-like TV show), Elisabeth Sparkle, who decides to shoot up an unregulated neon green drug to live as a younger version of herself (played by Margaret Qualley, as Sue).

The only catch — well, there are a lot of catches — is that the two versions cannot coexist. They must switch off every week. But life as young Sue is so intoxicating that, well, she doesn’t want to go back, and we all know nothing good happens in horror films when someone breaks the rules.

Then came five Globe nominations — including ones for Moore, Qualley and Fargeat, which was the biggest shocker. This isn’t just a horror film, though. At its heart, it’s a brutal, insightful commentary on Hollywood and impossible beauty standards, with some “Carrie” mixed in. It’s a battle cry for women of all ages to get great roles and respect in film. And Moore’s performance is beyond fierce. The scene in which she does her makeup in a mirror and then pummels her own face with disgust at what she’s seeing should go straight into a career-highlights reel.

That Moore has never won an award for her acting until this moment, in this movie about women being underappreciated, is a travesty. She was a member of the Brat Pack, yes, and part of that endless ensemble of great-looking ’80s young adults in “St. Elmo’s Fire,” but she also broke our hearts while sensuously throwing pottery with an extracorporeal Patrick Swayze in “Ghost.”

She embodied bold femininity, essentially defining ’90s celebrity by appearing nude and very pregnant on the cover of Vanity Fair in 1991, at the height of her fame — and that may have overshadowed her fine work in “A Few Good Men” and “Indecent Proposal.” We know all about her marriages to Bruce Willis and Ashton Kutcher. For a full decade, it seemed, changes in her haircut felt like front-page news. Did Oscar voters just think she was so famous she didn’t need awards?

“Thirty years ago, I had a producer tell me that I was a popcorn actress,” she said in her Globes acceptance speech, “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.”

What was she allowed to have, then? She got a Globe nomination for “Ghost” in 1991 and another for her supporting performance in the TV movie “If These Walls Could Talk” in 1997, and won some People’s Choice Awards in that time, but nothing from her peers, and since then, has had very few award-worthy roles. (She has, however, won four Razzies, given for the worst acting in a given year.) In her long career — this is shocking — the only acting award she’d received from her peers before Sunday night was an Independent Spirit Award. And that was just as part of the ensemble (the ensemble!) of “Margin Call” in 2012.

The belief that she was just good for box-office fluff, she added in her Globes speech, “corroded me over time,” to the point where just a few years ago, she thought that maybe she was done in this business, that she’d given all that she could.

“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,” she said in her speech.

The crowd seemed to agree.

Moore said that she felt that the movie had a message for women, and everyone, “in those moments when we don’t think we’re smart enough or pretty enough or skinny enough or successful enough, or basically just not enough.”

She continued: “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.’ And so today, I celebrate this as a marker of my wholeness and of the love that is driving me and for the gift of doing something I love and being reminded that I do belong.”

The Globes are not perfect predictors of who will win Oscars two months from now. Separate categories for comedies and drama allow for a broader swath of winners than will ultimately make the cut with the Academy on March 2. The best actress category is the most stacked of any part of the Oscars race, with Nicole Kidman, Angelina Jolie and Brazilian acting icon Fernanda Torres (who just won the Globe for lead actress in a drama) joining Moore in vying for a slot, alongside newcomer Mikey Madison in “Anora.”

But Moore’s eloquent speech, and how much she’s meant to film while never getting recognition, count for a lot.

She also happened to be wearing a statuesque golden gown. She looked like an Oscar. Maybe it’s a sign.