the Oscar nominee with a career defined by defiance

Demi Moore won the Golden Globe for best actress in January for her performance in the horror sci-fi film, The Substance. In her acceptance speech, she shared that, 30 years ago, a producer told her she was a “popcorn actress”. The implication was that she was not the kind of “serious” actor who might win awards.

Having now also received an Oscar nomination for the role, it seems her work is finally being taken seriously. During the 1980s and 1990s, Moore was a huge star and renowned for appearing in mainstream, big budget films – hence the “popcorn” label. If you go back to the films she is best known for, however, an interesting trend emerges.

As a researcher of gender in film and television, I’ve long been interested in Moore’s work. That’s because, while it is perhaps most explicit in The Substance, the majority of her oeuvre interrogates womanhood and power.

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In The Substance, Moore plays the fading celebrity Elisabeth Sparkle with ferocity. But the plaudits for her performance don’t mean this is something new – that ferociousness has always been there in her onscreen roles.

As femme fatale Meredith in Disclosure (1994), for example, she dominated every scene with an aggressive power that is rare to behold. Writing about Moore’s work in 2004, film researcher Linda Ruth Williams described that power as a “dangerous sexiness”.

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The Substance: Demi Moore is ferocious in gloriously gory satire on Hollywood’s female ageism

Meredith is a woman from senior executive Tom’s (Michael Douglas) past. When she walks back into his life, she comes close to derailing it entirely through a concoction of manipulative and cunning behaviour, an impressive business sense, and outright pure and simple aggression.

At one point, Tom even says he would in no way be a physical match for her due to the amount of time she spends exercising on a StairMaster machine. Though she doesn’t win out in the end, Meredith is by far the most powerful and compelling character in the film.

Even in Moore’s more passive roles, such as Molly in Ghost (1990), she steals the show. A big part of that is her uncanny ability to make her eyes flit between intense dark fury and overwhelming grief.

And I can’t ignore G.I. Jane (1997). In that film, Moore shaved herself a buzzcut on camera and yelled the unforgettable line “suck my dick” at Master Chief Urgayle (Viggo Mortensen) upending, or at least unsettling, social expectations of women in the military. Much of the power of Moore’s performance in this film is in the way she physically transformed for the role. Williams described the role as a work of “corporeal shapeshifting” due to the intense physical training Moore undertook for the part.

In A Few Good Men (1992), her character, Lieutenant Commander Joanne Galloway, rivals all others with her fierce intellect and knowledge of the law. While Tom Cruise’s Lieutenant Daniel Kaffee wows in the courtroom, it is Galloway’s knowledge of the case and refusal to bow to patriarchal power (largely embodied by Jack Nicholson’s Colonel Jessep) that sees them through.

Ageing in Hollywood

In September 2024, I was interviewed for an article about older women in film and television by the journalist Christobel Hastings.

In it, Hastings stated that “Hollywood has a long history of ignoring female actors”. Citing several research studies, she noted that women’s careers peak at age 30 in the industry, while men’s peak 15 years or more later.

But she also made the case that there has been an increase in the diversity of roles available to older actresses both in film and television. Such movement for female actresses has long been championed by the Geena Davis Institute, a research organisation focusing on equitable representation in media, for over 20 years.

If I were to sum up Moore’s career with one word, it would be defiance. And now, with The Substance, she has defied expectations once again by joining the (thankfully increasing) ranks of female actresses who are finding meaty roles as they head into middle or older age.