In ‘The Substance,’ Demi Moore went to the ‘deepest, most vulnerable places of fear and insecurity and self-doubt’
“So much of everything on this magical, wild mystery journey has been so unexpected,” Demi Moore says of her Best Actress Oscar nomination for The Substance. As the veteran star, who has already won accolades from the Golden Globes and Critics Choice Awards, tells Gold Derby, “getting to [this] moment really was truly, truly just beyond anything I could have ever imagined.” (Watch our video interview above.)
In The Substance, Moore stars as Elisabeth Sparkle, a fading celebrity known for hosting an aerobics TV show, who faces a devastating blow on her 50th birthday when her boss (Dennis Quaid) fires her due to her age. Distressed and reeling from her rejection, she turns to a black market drug called the Substance, which promises to transform her into an enhanced and much younger version of herself (Margaret Qualley), but with unexpected and ultimately catastrophic side effects.
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The satirical thriller is an audacious, postmodern body-horror fable that revels in its searing commentary on women’s internalized violence and self-loathing brought on in large part due to society’s pervasive, unrealistic beauty standards and ageism. Oscar-nominated writer-director Coralie Fargeat presents a world in which Elisabeth is not only suffocating from Hollywood’s demands on women, but also from the superficial, airbrushed reality of the world that surrounds her. Fargeat deploys a hyper-realistic, expressionist aesthetic to depict Elisabeth’s psychological turmoil, illustrating her perception through the distorted reality of the spaces that she inhabits.
Moore is enjoying a career resurgence on the back of her spectacular performance as the troubled Elisabeth, a troubled “woman of a certain age,” that Moore grounds in an often uncomfortably relatable vulnerability. Her performance is so effecting as her character’s search for flawless, clinical perfection leads her to self-destruct in her almost futile pursuit of what she believes society demands of her. “I felt a huge responsibility, as my contribution to this, that my job was to really bring the heart and anchor it in reality,” Moore explains, “so that it could go to those places that were so beyond reality. Go to those extreme absolutely bonkers, places, but yet be anchored in something that stayed relatable, that we didn’t get lost.
“I have a lot of scenes looking in the mirror, which is not the most comfortable,” she says with a wry smile. “How interesting it is that as human beings, our natural instinct, when we look in the mirror is to not find what’s right, but to find what’s wrong, and that can then lead us down those dark rabbit holes. And so, some of that was being present to where those moments took me and allowing myself to really open into those deepest, most vulnerable places of fear and insecurity and self-doubt,” she reveals.
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Moore appears to be enjoying the wild ride that is awards season, especially after winning her first major award at last month’s Golden Globe Awards, where she delivered a heartfelt acceptance speech, lamenting those times in her career where she was devalued as merely a “popcorn actress,” and therefore not worthy of recognition for her talent. “It’s not what was said to me, or who said it to me about being a ‘popcorn actress.’ It’s what I made it mean. Even though I may have taken it as he intended it, that doesn’t necessarily make it true. But I made it true. I did that to myself. I then limited what was possible for me. When I change that, and I opened myself up to not to needing to be acknowledged, but to knowing that that is not exclusive to someone else, that that is available to me too,” she says.
On the film’s overall message, Moore says that she has “come to learn that our tormentors are our mentors in the same way. This is presenting a challenge. But that challenge isn’t what we need to fight against. What we need to fight against is if we believe that is the only way that it can be. And if we shift that if women looked at the film, if women of a certain age hold their value and see and appreciate who they are, just as they are, not needing to be younger, not needing to be different, then in fact, I think the world will start reflecting that back.”
Moore suggests about what she hopes audiences to take away from the film. “We actually could be part of something that creates a cultural shift, not just in the issues around aging, beauty standards and self-worth, but in opening up and expanding the pathway of cinema. I’m feeling overjoyed and through the roof with excitement,” she admits. “I’m really trying to be in service to whatever this is connecting with, because it feels so much bigger, in truth, than all of us,” she says, adding that she’s particularly excited about how the film is resonating with younger audiences, which she declares “has been, for me, the most impactful, because we’re planting a seed in young people to shift how they’re holding themselves.”
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