Is it just me, or have we been seeing an awful lot of Demi Moore lately?
Beaming down from billboards for her role in The Substance, which has been hailed as a “pulsing, pumping blitzkrieg of pure entertainment” (in our review here). Getting her first-ever whiff of Oscars buzz. Gracing the red carpets of awards ceremonies, and starring in glossy TV shows about disgraced socialites: yep, Moore is back in town, and just like she did in the Nineties, she’s commanding us to sit up and take notice.
It’s about time too. Moore shot to fame as part of the original Brat Pack. She’d been diligently working for years — in the ABC soap opera General Hospital, then 1984 comedy Blame It On Rio — before she appeared in the role that would make her name: the 1985 drama St Elmo’s Fire.
It wasn’t critically acclaimed, but it sure was successful, raking in $37.8 million at the box office, and launched her career into the stratosphere, alongside fellow, contemporary actors like Rob Lowe, Molly Ringwald, Judd Nelson and Emilio Estevez.
Moore was never totally comfortable with being in the so-called Brat Pack, later describing the label as “demeaning”, but she leveraged that fame to make money, and films. Lots of both.
There was About Last Night, with Rob Lowe. 1989’s We’re No Angels. And of course, the 1990 smash-hit Ghost, which grossed $505 million at the box office and soon became embedded in the popular imagination (pottery wheels would never be the same again).
At the height of her fame, Moore was making millions of dollars per film. Producers for Striptease and G.I. Jane got into a bidding war to establish who would get to film with her first; as a result, she became the highest paid actress in Hollywood, earning $12.5m for Striptease. To put it in context, that’s more than any other woman in Hollywood had ever been offered at the time.
"She became a pioneer for other actresses by being the first female lead to demand the same salary, benefits and billing as her male counterparts," Lifetime wrote in 2017 — while, in her heyday, she graced magazine covers and was proclaimed by publications like People as one of the most beautiful woman in the world.
But of course, the good times couldn’t last, and Moore’s career faltered at the tail-end of the 1990s. 1996’s G.I. Jane was a commercial hit, but rumours abounded that it wasn’t a happy set. Her marriage to fellow superstar Bruce Willis (a Hollywood power couple if ever there was one) produced three daughters, Rumer, Scout and Tallulah. Then after 1997, she stepped out of the spotlight to care for them.
At this point, things came to a screeching stop. Moore took roles, but intermittently. "I had a project about a year and a half ago, and we made an inquiry about her — a real good commercial picture,” producer Irwin Winkler said in 2001. “She wasn't interested."
When she did appear in films, they received mixed reviews. She played a high-kicking villain in 2003 film Charlie’s Angels: Full Throttle (not a career highlight) and followed it up with a SAG-nominated performance in Emilio Estevez’s 2006 film Bobby, where she played an alcoholic singer.
Mostly, though, the roles she was given throughout the Noughties and especially 2010s reads like a copy and paste: mother, wife, old flame of the heroic male lead. By 2020, Moore was still acting, but her career seemed to be on the way out.
However, times have changed — as of 2024, Moore has been starring in some of the biggest and buzziest shows going. There was the 2023 Feud anthology, which told the story of Truman Capote’s falling out with the New York socialites known as the Swans, Babe Paley (Naomi Watts), Slim Keith (Diane Lane) and C.Z. Guest (Chloë Sevigny).
Moore played the tragic Ann Woodward, and while she didn’t appear on screen for long, audiences couldn’t take their eyes off her. She’s followed that up with The Substance, in which she plays an ageing starlet who seeks to reclaim her youth by taking a black-market drug, which splits her consciousness between her and an idealised younger version of herself.
It’s a gory horror story, and far from the typecast roles Moore was playing even a decade ago — “it’s not a glamour role”, she has said — but it’s already been getting awards buzz.
It was a brave choice. The role of down-and-out former star is one that might cut uncomfortably close to the bone, but she also told the Independent that she “walked away from it with a certain sense of liberation within myself. I knew there were going to be shots that highlighted my flaws, but those allowed me to find acceptance and appreciation in myself.”
It’s a sign, surely, that she’s ready for more, and there is more to come: an upcoming main role in the US oil rig drama (presumably more exciting than it sounds) Landman on Paramount+, for one.
We should be excited. Moore was, and remains, a risk-taker, switching between roles with chameleonic ease. In G.I. Jane, she shaved her head to play a soldier; in Ghost she was a lover; in Mortal Thoughts she was a murderer. She remains one of Hollywood’s most versatile actors: what a treat it is to see her getting those parts again.
