When Demi Moore was 40, she did a scene in a bikini in "Charlie’s Angels: Full Throttle."
"I had done ‘Charlie’s Angels,’ and there was a lot of conversation around this scene in a bikini, and it was all very heightened, a lot of talk about how I looked," the Hollywood beauty told actress Michelle Yeoh in a conversation for Interview Magazine about how entering her 40s affected her career.
"And then I found that there didn’t seem to be a place for me. I didn’t feel like I didn’t belong. It’s more like I felt that feeling of, ‘I’m not 20, I’m not 30,’ but I wasn’t yet what they perceived as a mother." Moore was actually already a mother of three at the time.
She added that her 40s were a time when she felt "not dead, but flat" in the industry.
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The 61-year-old is doing press for her new horror movie "The Substance," in which she plays a 50-year-old celebrity who finds a way to temporarily make herself younger — with troublesome side effects.
Earlier in the interview, Moore called the movie a "unique way to be exploring this issue of aging, of societal conditioning, of what I also see as the pressure of the male-idealized woman that we as women have bought into.
"At the core of it, what it’s really about is what we do to ourselves, and I loved that it was illustrated in such a physical way, showing that violence with what we do with our thoughts, how we attack ourselves and distort things. There’s great power in knowing that what we do to ourselves is a choice, and we can make a different choice."
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Moore was a breakout star in the 1980s and ‘90s, making a name for herself as a sex symbol in Hollywood with movies like "St. Elmo's Fire," "Ghost," "Indecent Proposal," "Striptease" and "G.I. Jane."
She was also the highest-paid actress in Hollywood for a time.
In 2019, she told Diane Sawyer about her "I don’t have anything to lose" mentality after she dropped out of high school and left her home as a teenager. She had once been raped, witnessed her mom try to commit suicide multiple times and began trying to make it in Hollywood.
"I don't have anything, so why not?" she told Sawyer of her thinking at the time.
After her divorce from Hollywood hunk Bruce Willis in 2000, Moore married actor Ashton Kutcher, a relationship that was hyped in the media mainly because he was 15 years younger.
During their marriage, which lasted 10 years, Moore became synonymous with the term "cougar."
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Moore recently joked to Kelly Ripa on her "Let’s Talk Off Camera" podcast that being a "sex symbol" was her "greatest role" because "it’s so not who I am."
"I realize I really like being busy. And you said something earlier, ‘Oh, my career’s always been on fire.' And I will tell you that’s actually not true. When I hit 40, I feel like they didn’t know what to do with me," she said. "Now I feel like women in their 40s — it’s a shift in perception — but I was part of the transitioning crowd, and they were a bit like, ‘We don’t have anything for you.’"
Ripa said she felt Moore helped "shift the perception" that women in their 40s can still be sexy.
"I don’t know if it was ‘Charlie’s Angels’ or — you know, you came out of the water in a bikini, and it was like, ‘Remember me? Here I am,'" Ripa noted.
Moore said she was told at the time she looked "too young" to play certain parts, but she wasn't 30, which made her too old for many parts.
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"And I literally, I was told, ‘We don’t really know what to do with you.' What’s been interesting, seeing the shift we’ve gone through," Moore said.
She added that streaming services have started to realize "there is a huge demographic that wants to be served. That’s powerful women and, in some cases, women not 30, women not 40, women in their 50s, 60s, 70s, and it’s exciting."
These days, Moore is staying busy. Aside from "The Substance," she just finished the limited series "Feud: Capote vs. The Swans." She was in Nicolas Cage's 2022 "The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent," and she's set to star in Taylor Sheridan's upcoming drama "Landman."
