The Renaissance of the Middle-Aged “Popcorn Actress” Is, Ironically, So Meta

Demi Moore was never meant to win a Golden Globe. After all, producers had long ago dismissed her as—to quote Moore herself—a “popcorn actress.” A big name and a beautiful face and nothing more. An actress who was meant to sell some movie tickets and then fade into the background to make way for the next bright young thing.

But this weekend, the unexpected happened. Moore, 62, did take home a Golden Globe—her first acting award. Ever. And, among her fellow nominees she is, somewhat surprisingly, no anomaly. As host Nikki Glaser noted, this is the year of the middle-aged actress “comeback.” In fact, of the six women nominated for lead actress in a motion picture - drama, all were over the age of 49. For their counterparts in the musical or comedy category, just half were younger than 40.

In addition to Moore’s critical success, both Pamela Anderson and Angelina Jolie have led indie projects this year that have lifted them from Hollywood’s pile of forgotten sex symbols to the status of celebrated award contender. And, in a meta twist, each of the films these actresses are being lauded for centers on a woman of a certain age who grapples with the entertainment industry’s cruelty towards its female stars, forced to confront the fact that her beloved public (and once-adoring producers) value her as nothing more than a pretty object that can eventually be discarded and replaced. Ironic, no? Or, perhaps this convenient pattern points to a wider reckoning within Hollywood. Perhaps the industry is finally being forced to take stock of the way it treated (and still treats) its young female stars.

In Moore’s “comeback” film, Coralie Fargeat’s The Substance, she plays Elizabeth Sparkle, an actress and fitness instructor who is unceremoniously booted from her show by her leering producer (Dennis Quaid) in favor of a younger, more marketable replacement. After realizing that her life is empty without her job—and, of course, the affirmation of fans—she turns to a black market drug, The Substance, which promises to bring out her best self. Her best self turns out to be Margaret Qualley, who emerges grotesquely from her spine. The pair are “one”—they must split their sentient time or risk gory consequences.

"Perhaps the industry is finally being forced to take stock of the way it treated (and still treats) its young female stars. "

The film descends into body horror absurdism, but, at its core, it critiques Hollywood’s morbid obsession with youth and its fickle coldness towards aging stars. Sound familiar? Moore, like Elizabeth, was a Hollywood darling of the ‘80s and ‘90s. However, after starring in films like Ghost and Striptease she was widely dismissed as a pretty face, not a legitimate actress. While she was making ballsy choices—shaving her head and undergoing military training for G.I. Jane; playing a blue collar killer in neo-noir thriller Mortal Thoughts—the press had pigeonholed her as a certain type of actress. Instead of taking her work seriously, for the most part, she was relegated to tabloid gossip that ramped up during her May-December marriage to Ashton Kutcher. It’s hardly surprising that, like Elizabeth, Moore found herself effectively self-harming in the pursuit of the perfection the industry demanded. “What I did to myself,” she said to The Guardian. “What I made it mean about me. Really looking at that violence, how violent we can be towards ourselves, how just brutal.” She added, “All of us, if we start to think our value is only with how we look, then ultimately we’re going to be crushed.”

Anderson’s cultural resurgence follows a surprisingly similar pattern. After she was labeled a sex symbol for her part in Baywatch and her critically panned film Barb Wire, she largely faded into the background. "I don't know if I kept going; I went home to my garden to make pickles and jams," the actress said recently to Entertainment Tonight. "I didn't know I was going to get this opportunity, so when I got it, I grabbed it by the throat, because I am resilient and I needed to know what I was made of, for me."

The opportunity she’s speaking of is Gia Coppola’s The Last Showgirl. In it, Anderson takes on the role of Shelly, a middle-aged showgirl whose iconic Las Vegas revue is being shut down. The show is a cultural relic of a different time—a time when showgirls were elite icons of a buzzing city. It’s a time that Shelly, who has been dancing in the revue since the ‘80s, can still remember. As she hits the audition circuit, Shelly is forced to reckon with the fact that she is no longer considered a marketable dancer. Like Moore’s Elizabeth, she is seen as an outdated product to be tossed aside. Seeing her realize the career she loves is over—and that no one ever really appreciated her work anyway—is heartbreaking.

"It’s hardly surprising that, like Elizabeth, Moore found herself effectively self-harming in the pursuit of the perfection the industry demanded."

Anderson’s performance has been widely praised, if backhandedly—”Yes, Pamela Anderson can act,” proclaimed the Chicago Sun-Times. Like Moore, she has earned a few career-first awards nods, including nominations for a Golden Globe and a Gotham Award. Perhaps her success is partly linked to the fact that the film’s themes are ones that she already knows intimately. "I was able to bring a lot of my own personal experience, my long life of dealing with beauty and glamour and aging and reassessing life choices,” she said during her Variety Actors on Actors conversation. “I got to bring my whole life into this role.”

And finally, there’s Angelina Jolie, who stars in Pablo Larraín’s Maria, a biopic about the final, confused days of operatic diva Maria Callas. In the film, Maria has lost her voice and, with it, her sense of self. Absent her career and her art, what is her identity?

Jolie could relate. “I’m sure there’s a lot that will be read into it of our overlaps as women, but the one that’s maybe not the most obvious is I’m not sure how comfortable we both are with being public. And there was a pressure behind the working that wasn’t just the joy of the work,” she told The Hollywood Reporter. “And yet I do love to create, she does love to sing, but sometimes there are all these other things that take that joy away and change the experience of that.”

Jolie was one of Hollywood’s It girls in the ‘90s and early aughts, starring in blockbusters like Tomb Raider and Gone in 60 Seconds. But after early critical acclaim for Girl, Interrupted, she became tabloid fodder, her career overshadowed by her personal life. Professionally, she was out of the spotlight. While Anderson turned to making jam, Jolie went behind the camera, spending much of the 2010s directing. Her work in Maria has also been deemed an unexpected return. Reviewers have sung her praises: “Angelina Jolie has never been better,” claimed Empire, while RogerEbert.com commended her “queenly performance of poise and mystique.”

All three of these so-called comeback stars are major award contenders this year. There is a celebratory feeling in the air—a feeling that three under-appreciated, misjudged middle-aged stars are getting their due! Finally, they landed the project that made people sit up and take notice of the talent that had evidently been lurking beneath the surface for all these years! But simply celebrating their revivals isn’t quite enough. After all, each of these films highlights the toxicity of the entertainment industry towards its female stars—each shows us a woman who has been barrelled through the system, taught to live by its rules and believe in its values, and then spat out the other side. And heartbreakingly, the women leading these projects have been through it all themselves; through their work, revealing the traumas they themselves were put through. As such, these are films that are all too rare—films that are not only calling out the problematic ways in which women are treated in Hollywood, but also simultaneously giving "discarded" stars the chance to do what they do best—act. Maybe if more producers gave young, beautiful actresses the credit to take on meatier, more meaningful roles (many of 2024’s major films—Hit Man, A Complete Unknown, Gladiator II, Challengers—still don’t pass the Bechdel test), actresses wouldn’t have a nadir that they need to come back from.

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