With her first Oscar nomination finally landing after a hard-fought, four-decade career in Hollywood, The Substance star Demi Moore is no longer standing in labels heaped upon her by industry naysayers — instead, she’s fully in her “Yaya” era, thank you very much.
“Yes, yes, hi baby! I’ll be right back. I love you!” the 62-year-old says to someone else in the room with her, on a brief pause from her phone interview with Entertainment Weekly on Oscar nominations morning. “It is my coffee, you’re right! Yaya needs coffee early in the morning,” she continues, clearly speaking to granddaughter Louetta Isley Thomas Willis. When Moore returns to our chat, she stresses: “I’m moving where I can get to better service, I don’t want to break up.”
In other words, she wants what she says about her work in director Coralie Fargeat’s body-horror masterpiece to come across crystal clear, particularly after she previously told EW (and said in her Golden Globes acceptance speech) that she once felt so ostracized by the industry (including an unnamed producer calling her a “popcorn actress”) that she considered leaving acting behind altogether.
“The most important part of that is that what that person said or didn’t say is irrelevant. How I held it was everything,” Moore tells EW when asked if she’s since heard from the aforementioned producer amid her awards-season success. “It’s what I made it mean. It doesn’t matter if they actually meant it as I took it, but it’s what I made it mean about me, and it’s that I believed that I was never someone who would think or even consider that I could be acknowledged or honored for my work. I could do the work, but it couldn’t be something that was part of the equation. I think I believed that.”
She admits that her role in The Substance as Elisabeth Sparkle — an actress cast aside by her industry on her 50th birthday, who eventually takes a drug that births from her spine a younger version of herself (Margaret Qualley) — was a “risky” move at this stage of her career after she felt that taking on projects that “had a provocative nature” earlier in her career “didn’t get any real consideration.” This, as she said at the Globes, led to her designation as a “popcorn actress,” thanks to her wild popularity as part of the Brat Pack and in later box office hits like Ghost, Striptease, and Disclosure.
Demi Moore in ‘The Substance’. Courtesy Cannes Film Festival
“It started to feel like things corroded,” Moore says, looking back on darker times. “If that wasn’t part of what was out there for me, maybe the universe was saying that I was done.”
That is until the “divine timing” of The Substance brought her to this moment — and back on track, reframing a brief period of doubt where she considered leaving acting behind for good. She says that her nomination for the film is a motivator to keep “driving to do meaningful and memorable work that makes a difference both in entertainment and in cultural shifts,” as the movie has resonated with audiences worldwide for its comment on resilience and resistance amid ageism and sexism.
While she’s over the “popcorn actress” era, Moore’s more commercial work still has its loyal fans — like, for example, the cult audience that’s stuck with 2003’s Charlie’s Angels: Full Throttle, the blockbuster sequel in which she played the villainous Madison Lee opposite Cameron Diaz, Drew Barrymore, and Lucy Liu.
Sign up for Entertainment Weekly‘s free daily newsletter to get breaking TV news, exclusive first looks, recaps, reviews, interviews with your favorite stars, and more.
The film was a critical disappointment, but its camp nature has cemented it as a genuine pleasure for millennial audiences. When asked if anyone along the way has brought up a possible revival of her character in another Angels film (Spoiler alert: Yes, we know Madison technically died in the movie), Moore laughs.
“Um, no. Nobody’s brought that up,” she says. “In our current times, anything is possible.”
Still, if her success for The Substance is any indication, there’s always room to keep growing: “[The movie is] that marker of the universe saying — as I said in my [Golden Globes] speech, ‘You’re not done. You’re not done yet.'”
The 2025 Oscars air Sunday, March 2 on ABC, at 7 p.m. ET/4 p.m. PT, with the official red carpet presentation beginning at 6:30 p.m. ET/3:30 p.m. PT, with Conan O’Brien set to make his Academy Awards hosting debut.
