By Melena Ryzik
Demi Moore is the star of one of the goriest, most audacious films ever nominated for an Oscar, the feminist body-horror satire “The Substance.” Onscreen, Moore, 62, dissolves and mutates in often grisly ways — nude, and in extreme close-up. And she could not be more self-actualized about it.
The role required “wrestling with the flashes of my own insecurity and ego,” Moore explained. “I was being asked to share those things that I don’t necessarily want people to see.”
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 “gift — silver lining, blessing, whatever you want to call it,” she continued. “Once you put it all out there, what else is there? There’s nothing to hide. Being able to let go was another layer of liberation for me.” The next night, she won the Critics Choice prize for best actress.
Her career and cultural resurgence is overdue, said Ryan Murphy, the showrunner and a friend who at long last persuaded her to work with him in last year’s “Feud: Capote vs. The Swans.” 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: “Game to do anything,” he said. “She’s a pathfinder. We all talk about what she’s done for the business and for other women.”
And, he added, “she is one of the most emotionally intelligent people that you’ll ever meet. Whenever I have an emotional dilemma or I need advice, I do not go to my shrink — I go to her.”
With “The Substance,” Moore is the Oscars’ 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’s title, and birth — through a gaping wound in her spine — a more youthful self, named Sue (Margaret Qualley). They’re supposed to switch weekly, while the other vegetates. But in the battle for nubile flesh — and thus popularity — Elisabeth loses, grotesquely so.
“The Substance” is a bit of a genre-buster: Moore has described the project as a cross between Oscar Wilde’s classic, “The Picture of Dorian Gray”; the 1992 black comedy “Death Becomes Her”; and a Jane Fonda workout video. It’s vying for best picture as well, and French filmmaker Coralie Fargeat was nominated for directing and for her script.
It’s mostly sparked conversation for its none-too-subtle message. But Moore’s singular performance — which also draws on her real-life past as a sex symbol whose form was both worshipped and castigated — 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, often gazing at her own reflection — “which is really not the most comfortable place to be,” Moore said. “We look for what’s wrong.”
The prosthetics that turn her into a wizened creature “were their own mixed bag of tricks,” she added, and “figuring out the logic and the rules, because it’s also a world that doesn’t exist. Like, OK, I’m in this totally aged, degraded body, but I can haul ass down a hallway.”
Until its premiere at the Cannes Film Festival in May, she added, she wasn’t even sure the movie would work (it wound up winning best screenplay). And she was immediately indelible, in unexpected ways: Moore’s husky voice is one of her trademarks. “I was astonished at how powerful she was in silence,” Murphy said.
In an email, Qualley gushed about her co-star. “Demi is the magic blend of deep consideration and the ability to courageously live in the present,” she said. She learned something every day; their collaboration was “one of the great gifts of my life,” Qualley added.
The production, which stretched over 5 1/2 months in France, was also among the most strenuous of Moore’s 40-year-career, she said. “G.I. Jane,” the 1997 Ridley Scott action drama in which she buffed up to play a Navy SEAL-esque recruit, “was physically very challenging,” Moore said, “but it was very straightforward. This was emotionally and physically draining every day — every day. Even the simplest scenes.”
And yet it was the leap she sought, after stepping back from acting intermittently over the years: first, soon after her ’90s heyday, to raise the three daughters she shares with Bruce Willis, her ex-husband; and then to take stock of herself.
One thing that emerged from this period, alongside a renewed focus on sobriety, was her unflinching, bestselling 2019 memoir, “Inside Out.” In it, among many other traumas, she details the disordered eating and overexercising she engaged in for years — she once put a lock on her refrigerator — and how she emerged with a far less fractured sense of self.
The “Substance” 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’s story resonated with her — and, she added, “not from a place of the wound, but from the place that actually had healing.”
Moore was not interested in litigating blame. “Look, women being marginalized at a certain age, particularly in the entertainment industry, is the least-new information of the entire movie,” she said.
Neither was she only highlighting what she called “that painful state that I think we’ve all experienced, because we’re human, which is of compare and despair.” What drew her to the screenplay was the way those impulses were turned inward, violently. “Because 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.”
There were vast gulfs between her and the lonesome, career-obsessed Elisabeth, she said. But, she added: “Emotionally, it wasn’t that big of a reach. I really did understand her.”
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