Moore was first nominated for a Globe for ’80s brat pack fare like “St. Elmo’s Fire” and the 1991 blockbuster romance “Ghost.” Hits like “Indecent Proposal” and “Stripties” earned her a then-record $12.5 million paycheck, her marriage to co-star Bruce Willis made her a Hollywood phenomenon in the ’90s.
But the perception of him as a mere commercial actor, symbolized by the producer’s comment, “corrupted me over time,” he said at the Globes. He thought he might have been cast, but what he called a “magical, audacious, bold, out-of-the-box, absolutely bonkers script” for “The Substance” pulled him back.
The brutally bloody “The Substance,” by French filmmaker Coralie Fargeat, was an unlikely Oscar contender. Academy voters don’t tend to go for Gore. But this year was an exception: the film is in the running for Best Picture, while Forget also received nominations for best director and screenplay.
“The Substance” follows Moore’s Elizabeth Sparkle, once an A-list star and now the host of a TV fitness show, as the industry summarily rejects her, simply because of aging. Enter the mysterious potion of the title, which allows Elizabeth to give birth to a younger, more noble version of herself (Margaret Qualley). Questions abound, both metaphorical and physical.
Fargeat aims for an extreme, almost comical level of gross-out, and critique of standards of beauty. “‘The Substance’ is very much about what we, as women, have to conform to and how that affects our lives socially,” she said, before the film opened. It won the Best Screenplay award at the Cannes Film Festival last year.
And Moore’s performance seemed to exult and rebuke her own image, and her past, as an object of lust. (See especially: Anger at her naked and pregnant 1991 Vanity Fair covershot by Annie Leibovitz.)
She wrote in her best-selling 2019 memoir, “Inside Out,” about how twisted her sense of self was, and how she suffered from an eating disorder for years. And used to exercise more. “I was putting all my importance on who I am, what my body is, how it looks, and giving other people’s opinions more power than my own,” she said in an interview last year.
It was one of the reasons why “substance” resonated with him the way it did, as he explained from the Globes stage. “In those moments when we don’t think we’re smart enough or pretty enough or thin enough or successful enough or basically enough. I’ve had a woman say to me, ‘Just know, you never There won’t be enough. But you can know your worth if you just put down the measuring stick.”
