Demi Moore on the Real Message She Wants You to Take From 'The Substance'
It’s been a long time in the making, but Demi Moore finally has her Golden Globe award – a full 34 years after first being nominated for Ghost.
Last night, the 62-year-old won best actress in a motion picture comedy or musical for the body-horror film, The Substance, in which she plays a faded celebrity driven to injecting a black market drug to rejuvenate herself, with gruesome results. If you didn’t manage to catch the Carolie Fargeat-directed film at the cinema in September, we highly recommend doing so now.
During Moore’s emotional speech, she revealed that she’d previously been callously dismissed by an industry producer who had said she’d never amount to anything more than a “popcorn actress”, and that this had “corroded” her. Explaining that this had put the fire in her belly for her outstanding performance in The Substance, she also revealed the message that she wants people to take from the gory film: ignore everyone else and “know the value of your own worth”.
Here’s Moore’s rousing speech in full:
“Oh wow, I really wasn’t expecting that. I’m just in shock right now. 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. I’m just so humbled and grateful.
“30 years ago, I had a producer tell me that I was a ‘popcorn actress’ and at that time I made that mean that this [Golden Globe] 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 and I bought in and I believed that. That corroded me over time, to the point where I thought that a few years ago that maybe this was it. Maybe I was complete, maybe I’d done what I was supposed to do. And as I was kind of at 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 you’re not done.
“And I am so grateful for Coralie [Fargeat] for trusting me to step in and play this woman. For Margaret [Qualley] for being the other half of me that I couldn’t have done without, for looking out for me, for the people who’ve been with me for over 30 years, everyone at CAA, Untitled, Lead. All of the people who’ve stood by me, especially the people who believed in me when I haven’t believed in myself.
“And I’ll just leave you with one thing that I think this movie is imparting. 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 – 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, so thank you so much”.
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