\n<\/p>\n
Demi Moore is the star of one of the goriest, most audacious films ever nominated for an Oscar, the feminist body-horror satire \u201cThe Substance.\u201d Onscreen, Moore, 62, dissolves and mutates in often grisly ways \u2014 nude, and in extreme close-up. And she could not be more self-actualized about it.<\/p>\n
The role required \u201cwrestling with the flashes of my own insecurity and ego,\u201d Moore explained. \u201cI was being asked to share those things that I don\u2019t necessarily want people to see.\u201d<\/p>\n
She was speaking in a video interview last week, dressed in casual black and big glasses, twisting and tucking her legs under her, on her office couch, with every thought. Filming through that discomfort was a \u201cgift \u2014 silver lining, blessing, whatever you want to call it,\u201d she continued. \u201cOnce you put it all out there, what else is there? There\u2019s nothing to hide. Being able to let go was another layer of liberation for me.\u201d The following night, she won the Critics Choice prize<\/a> for best actress.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Her career and cultural resurgence is overdue, said Ryan Murphy, the showrunner and a friend who at long last convinced her to work with him in last year\u2019s \u201cFeud: Capote vs. The Swans<\/a>.\u201d She had the beauty and aura of an old-school movie star, he said, with the professional discipline to match, but the flexibility of a seeker: \u201cGame to do anything,\u201d he said. \u201cShe\u2019s a pathfinder. We all talk about what she\u2019s done for the business and for other women.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n And, he added, \u201cshe is one of the most emotionally intelligent people that you\u2019ll ever meet. Whenever I have an emotional dilemma or I need advice, I do not go to my shrink \u2014 I go to her.\u201d<\/p>\n With \u201cThe Substance,\u201d Moore is the Oscars\u2019 best actress front-runner too, for playing Elisabeth Sparkle, a onetime A-lister turned TV fitness instructor who is unscrupulously put out to pasture for the Hollywood sin of existing past 50. Her desperate solution is to inject herself with the mysterious concoction of the movie\u2019s title, and birth \u2014 through a gaping wound in her spine \u2014 a more youthful self, named Sue (Margaret Qualley). They\u2019re supposed to switch weekly, while the other vegetates. But in the battle for nubile flesh \u2014 and thus popularity \u2014 Elisabeth loses, grotesquely so.<\/p>\n \u201cThe Substance\u201d is a bit of a genre-buster: Moore has described the project as a cross between Oscar Wilde\u2019s classic, \u201cThe Picture of Dorian Gray\u201d; the 1992 black comedy \u201cDeath Becomes Her\u201d; and a Jane Fonda workout video. It\u2019s vying for best picture as well, and the French filmmaker Coralie Fargeat was nominated for directing and for her script.<\/p>\n It\u2019s mostly sparked conversation for its none-too-subtle message<\/a>. But Moore\u2019s singular performance \u2014 which also draws on her real-life past as a sex symbol whose form was both worshiped and castigated<\/a> \u2014 is not just metaphor. It is enthrallingly physical, a feat of wordless emotional range: She has comparatively little dialogue; is hardly onscreen with a co-star (at least when both are conscious); and communicates mostly through tight shots<\/a>, often gazing at her own reflection \u2014 \u201cwhich is really not the most comfortable place to be,\u201d Moore said. \u201cWe look for what\u2019s wrong.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n The prosthetics that turn her into a wizened creature \u201cwere their own mixed bag of tricks,\u201d she added, and \u201cfiguring out the logic and the rules, because it\u2019s also a world that doesn\u2019t exist. Like, OK, I\u2019m in this totally aged, degraded body, but I can haul ass down a hallway.\u201d<\/p>\n Until its premiere at the Cannes Film Festival last May, she added, she wasn\u2019t even sure the movie would work (it wound up winning best screenplay). And she was immediately indelible, in unexpected ways: Moore\u2019s husky voice is one of her trademarks. \u201cI was astonished at how powerful she was in silence,\u201d Murphy said.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n In an email, Qualley gushed about her co-star. \u201cDemi is the magic blend of deep consideration and the ability to courageously live in the present,\u201d she said. She learned something every day; their collaboration was \u201cone of the great gifts of my life,\u201d Qualley added.<\/p>\n The production, which stretched over five-and-a-half months in France, was also among the most strenuous of Moore\u2019s 40-year-career, she said. \u201cG.I. Jane,\u201d the 1997 Ridley Scott action drama in which she buffed up to play a Navy S.E.A.L.-esque recruit, \u201cwas physically very challenging,\u201d Moore said, \u201cbut it was very straightforward. This was emotionally and physically draining every day \u2014 every day<\/em>. Even the simplest scenes.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n And yet it was the leap she sought, after stepping back from acting intermittently over the years: first, soon after her \u201990s heyday, to raise the three daughters she shares with Bruce Willis, her ex-husband; and then to take stock of herself.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n One thing that emerged from this period, alongside a renewed focus on sobriety, was her unflinching, best-selling 2019 memoir,<\/a> \u201cInside Out.\u201d In it, among many other traumas, she details the disordered eating and overexercising she engaged in for years \u2014 she once put a lock on her refrigerator \u2014 and how she emerged with a far less fractured sense of self.<\/p>\n The \u201cSubstance\u201d role was not handed to Moore; Fargeat considered other actresses and it took a half-dozen meetings between the two to finalize the casting. In one of those encounters, Moore shared a copy of her book (written with Ariel Levy, of The New Yorker). It was a plain-on-the-page vehicle, Moore said, to show how much Fargeat\u2019s story resonated with her \u2014 and, she added, \u201cnot from a place of the wound, but from the place that actually had healing.\u201d<\/p>\n Moore was not interested in litigating blame. \u201cLook, women being marginalized at a certain age, particularly in the entertainment industry, is the least-new information of the entire movie,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n Neither was she only highlighting what she called \u201cthat painful state that I think we\u2019ve all experienced, because we\u2019re human, which is of compare and despair.\u201d What drew her to the screenplay was the way those impulses were turned inward, violently. \u201cBecause I can look and say there is nothing that anyone else has done to me, that is worse than what I have done to myself.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n There were vast gulfs between her and the lonesome, career-obsessed Elisabeth, she said. But, she added: \u201cEmotionally, it wasn\u2019t that big of a reach. I really did understand her.\u201d<\/p>\n Moore escaped \u2014 or persevered through \u2014 a turbulent, peripatetic childhood, striking out on her own at 16. She was a soap opera regular by 19, then made her name on the Brat Pack movies<\/a> like \u201cSt. Elmo\u2019s Fire,\u201d and became a superstar with a string of \u201990s hits including \u201cGhost,\u201d \u201cA Few Good Men\u201d and \u201cIndecent Proposal.\u201d Earning a $12.5 million paycheck for \u201cStriptease,\u201d in 1996, made her the highest-paid actress in the world, but did not engender good will. (She acquired the sneering nickname \u201cGimme Moore.\u201d Willis, who then made even bigger bank as an action hero, got no such derision.)<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Another flashpoint came with her 1991 Vanity Fair cover,<\/a> photographed by Annie Leibovitz. Moore was seven months pregnant with her second daughter and Leibovitz snapped a shot of her, bejeweled and naked, ostensibly as an end-of-day family photo. Long before celebrities gleefully bared their bumps, Moore\u2019s elegant flaunt remains one of her proudest achievements, she said in her memoir. \u201cIt helped move the needle culturally, whether I intended it to or not,\u201d Moore wrote. \u201cTo help women love themselves and their natural shapes, that\u2019s a remarkable and gratifying thing to have accomplished, particularly for someone like me who spent years doing battle with her body.\u201d<\/p>\n The idea that she bared her skin \u2014 in movies or elsewhere \u2014 out of confidence was a long-held public misperception, she told me. \u201cI was so uncomfortable. I was trying to just find ways of overcoming it.\u201d <\/p>\n These days, Moore is trying to absorb the critical and industry adulation for \u201cThe Substance,\u201d without weighing it too heavily. \u201cWhatever happens, I just keep focusing on remembering not to make it mean too much, but also not to make it mean too little,\u201d she said. \u201cBut I can enjoy all of it.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n She seemed to turbocharge her Oscar campaign with her win at the Golden Globes<\/a> last month. (She had been nominated before, but never won.) In her stunned speech, she mentioned a producer who negated her as \u201ca popcorn actress,\u201d and also repeated some wisdom from a woman she met decades ago, who told her blankly that she would never be good enough \u2014 \u201cbut you could know the value of your worth, if you put down the measuring stick.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n