The Misogyny Demi Moore Overcame to Make This Oscar-Race Comeback

In an evening of surprises at the Golden Globes, perhaps the most satisfying win of the night came when Demi Moore took home the Best Actress in a Comedy/Musical award for The Substance.

It was a rarity in Hollywood awards season: a body horror satire with a 62-year-old female lead that spits in the face of the entertainment industry’s sexism and splatters enough blood and guts at the screen to make even David Cronenberg nauseous.

For Moore, who was clearly surprised by the announcement, it was a moment that had been a long time coming. After over 40 years in the business, she won her first major acting award and gave a moving speech that celebrated the women who refuse to have their lives measured by the impossible yardsticks of patriarchal rule. It was a speech that catapulted her to the lead of the Best Actress Oscar race, and frankly, it should be hers to lose.

Demi Moore never really went away, but this moment still feels like a comeback in the grand scheme of her storied career. She’s an industry stalwart who has worked consistently across film, TV, and even podcasts but is now in the spotlight and appreciated for the reasons she was disparaged for much of her career.

In her speech, Moore quoted a producer who once derisively referred to her as a “popcorn actress”, meaning that they saw her and her work as lacking in substance (all puns intended.) It’s indicative of how, even when she was the highest-paid woman in Hollywood and a major box office draw, she had to endure the status of the film industry’s most beloved punching bag.

It’s not just that the industry dismissed her as a “popcorn actress.” She was publicly derided by the business and media for years in highly personal ways.

Her acting skills were constantly called into question, as were her record-breaking paydays, in ways that the highly-paid men of the era were seldom criticized for. The ever-tasteless Razzie Awards loved to repeatedly nominate her, even when her work was good, because she was an easy target. (She’s actually their most nominated woman, alongside Madonna and Jennifer Lopez.)

In the Vanity Fair profile that accompanies the iconic image of a heavily pregnant and nude Moore, anonymous producers snidely comment that Moore’s success “and the fact that she’s Mrs. Bruce Willis all went to her head at the same moment, swelling it unmercifully.” Another claimed that “the public [was] turning off” on both Moore and her then-husband Bruce Willis. Remember, at that point in time, she was a box office hit-maker, but she still earned the dubious nickname “Gimme Moore” for pushing back, for wanting to be paid as fairly as her box office receipts reflected.

After taking a few years off, she returned to film in 2003 with Charlie’s Angels: Full Throttle. That movie, coupled with her new relationship with the younger Ashton Kutcher, brought with it a renewed barrage of cruelty towards Moore. The ageism she faced was staggering, as the press declared her over the hill and a cradle-snatcher at the age of 40. The media poured over every inch of her body, guessing what surgeries she may have had and leering while declaring she needed to cover up. Moore inadvertently became the public litmus test for aging women in the public eye.

Even at her commercial peak with films like Ghost and A Few Good Men, Moore was viewed as a beautiful body and not much else by too many people. Her excellent memoir, Inside Out, is full of stories of how this obsessive focus on her beauty led her to unhealthy diets and intense exercise.

So fearful of being mocked for her nude scenes in Indecent Proposal, she worked out for hours every day to get fit, only for director Adrian Lyne to tell her she looked like “a f---ing man.” When she landed the role in Striptease, for which she received a record-breaking salary of $12.5 million, director Andrew Bergman derisively admitted to Entertainment Weekly that she was cast because “no other major star was willing to take her clothes off.”

No woman is exempt from this cruelty in the film business, but it is notable just how besieged Moore was by this pressure from the earliest days of her career right up to the present day.

In the past few decades, Moore has mostly been a supporting player and indie star, putting in some of her finest work for tiny audiences (see the high camp gender satire of Please Baby Please or her scene-stealing work in the most recent season of Feud.) Most people expected The Substance to be a niche work, seen by critics and gore-hounds. Instead, it became a major commercial and critical hit, and now it’s a potential Oscars victor.

The Substance is a total blast, but it would not work without Demi Moore at its heart. This is her story, a metatextual vivisection of the unwinnable game she, and every woman, has been forced to play for decades.

As Elisabeth Sparkle, the actress turned fitness guru who creates a younger version of herself, her self-loathing and simmering rage are painfully familiar. The world keeps telling her that she’s washed up and it’s worn her to nothing.

In the film’s most famous (non-viscera-heavy) scene, one that will surely be her Oscar clip, Elisabeth stares herself down in the mirror as she prepares for a date. Despite being stunningly beautiful, she cannot bear to look at what is reflected back at her. This moment of unbearable tragedy, the grounding force in a giddily melodramatic bloodbath, feels like the acting tour-de-force that Moore has been waiting decades to let the world see. The more the body parts fly and the blood soaks the sets, the more you remember that look in Moore’s eyes as she tries not to hate herself for being “old.”

It’s no wonder that Moore’s work has resonated with so many, nor is it a surprise that the internet is rooting for her. This comeback feels a lot like Brendan Fraser’s awards season triumph: a ’90s favorite who the industry dismissed as frivolous getting their due with a transformative, prosthetics-heavy role, and revelling in the nostalgic glow of a renewed appreciation for their skills.

It’s a great story and we know that the Academy loves a narrative when it comes to their acting winners. Moore deserves to win on the strength of her performance in The Substance alone, but it would be a victory all the more satisfying by the weight of what accompanies it. It shouldn’t have taken over four decades for people to fully appreciate Moore but this comeback is truly the ultimate revenge.