Copy link Copied Copy link Copied Subscribe to gift this article Gift 5 articles to anyone you choose each month when you subscribe. Already a subscriber? Login A quarter-century since she last made a serious impact on screen, Demi Moore could have stayed faded. But she had other ideas.
In The Substance , she has leapt back into focus with a savage, self-lacerating commentary on her own relationship with stardom. Demi Moore stars as Elisabeth Sparkle, an Oscar-winning actress whose second career as a televised exercise host comes to an abrupt end. Universal Films Moore has never done anything to prepare us for this body-horror shocker, a go-for-broke Cannes sensation – moving and staggeringly gruesome – that makes you rethink her whole career.
To mount this comeback, Moore sets about satirising what she was up against as one of the most bankable A-list stars of the early 1990s: impossible beauty standards, a finite shelf life, the skeevy dominion of the casting couch. In the ugly glare of a media spotlight that made her notorious, then gave her nicknames, no wonder she suddenly went to ground. If you wrote a book about what happens once female sex symbols turn 40, Moore could be the cover girl.
After she’d graced every billboard in various stages of undress to promote her films, the transition was almost Icarus-like – and it happened so abruptly, as soon as Ridley Scott’s G.I. Jane , the last in a ruinous sequence of flops, came out in 1997.
Since then, what? Moore .