STEPHANE DE SAKUTIN/AFP/East News, Evan Agostini/Invision/East News

Demi Moore drops humble brag about why she thought her Hollywood career was over

Demi Moore recalled feeling like an outsider as she struggled to get cast in films after making history as the first woman to get paid a whopping $12.5 million for a movie.

While appearing on a new episode The Hollywood Reporter’s Awards Chatter podcast, the star, 62, said she began to wonder if her career was ‘over’ as her acting opportunities begun to dwindle.

Her career stall coincided with a string of unsuccessful films starting with The Scarlet Letter (1995), then the coming-of-age drama Now and Then and the thriller The Juror (1996).

This led to her discovering that she ‘looked too good to play older, and was not young enough to play the others.’

‘I didn’t quite know where I fit or where I belonged,” she explained, which led her to consider, ‘Have I done what I was supposed to do in this?’

Ultimately, she scaled back on output of films, apart from a handful of supporting roles, like her cameo in Charlie’s Angels: Full Throttle (2003), and, most recently, starring in The Substance, for which she has earned critical recognition and Oscar buzz.

Immediately after reading the script of her latest project, the mother-of-three recalled feeling ‘quite blown away.’

‘It really captivated me, the way in which it was exploring this subject of aging… it just felt so relatable, on a human level,’ she said. ‘The other part of it was new territory for me — a body horror film. But as an actor, there were so many interesting challenges, not just the physical side of it, with the prosthetics, but the emotional rawness needing to be conveyed with very little dialogue.’

Despite empathizing with her character, Elisabeth Sparkle, in The Substance, which explores the challenges of aging in the public eye, Moore pointed out their differences.

‘Elizabeth Sparkle and I are very different,’ she told listeners. ‘If you notice, she has no friends, she has no family, she has no balance in her life. Her entire reflection of value is only on the external. What I did relate to is not what was being done to her, but what she did to herself.’

Moore continued: ‘Because again, I have experienced it in many different ways. It’s not that I don’t still experience it. The difference today is I have different tools. I have a different way of catching it and shifting it and knowing what’s real and what’s not real, and that the value of who I really am is not just my external self.’

While attending the 2024 Gotham Awards on Monday night, Moore opened up to People about how her relationship with aging has shifted as she has gotten older.

‘I can look back and go at 20, at 30 I was finding things that weren’t good enough,’ she recalled. ‘My relationship with [aging] now is much more in a joyous acceptance.’

Still, she admits to occasionally thinking ‘oh I wish that was not that way’ but, typically, sees herself with ‘the fullness’ of who she is versus the ‘external idea of’ who she is.

In The Substance, Moore plays a movie star whose career is on the decline because of her advancing age.

Elizabeth finds out about a fluid called The Substance, which she can inject to create a younger version of herself who can act in her place.

Sue, played by Margaret Qualley, emerges as the new youthful version of Elizabeth, who has to move her mind back and forth between the young and old bodies weekly.

However, the process of keeping the Sue body in operation causes Elizabeth’s original body to grow dramatically older extremely fast.