This story is from Handbook, GQ’s flagship e-newsletter providing helpful recommendation on type, well being, and extra, 4 days per week. Join right here to get it in your inbox.
A few of Demi Moore’s many well-known co-stars have, over the previous years and a long time, determined to revisit a few of their signature characters. Tom Cruise, Moore’s not-quite love curiosity in A Few Good Males, famously saved cinema by bringing again Maverick for a High Gun sequel. Michael Douglas, Moore’s opponent in Disclosure, revived Gordon Gekko for Wall Avenue: Cash By no means Sleeps again in 2010. And whereas Moore’s Indecent Proposal benefactor Robert Redford hasn’t carried out a long-gap sequel, The Outdated Man and the Gun is definitely a send-off for a sure kind of wily, charming Redford rogue. But Moore herself—regardless of a serious run of large hits within the first half of the ’90s and a excessive stage of identify recognition that stretches far past her profession peak—has no equal character she could possibly be anticipated to deliver again. For all of the adventurousness of her work, her public picture seems like herself—and, conversely, that self feels extra like a picture than a clearly outlined persona. It’s each an enviable and precarious place for a performer to search out herself in. And in a roundabout method, that’s the topic of her new film The Substance.
Moore’s character, the improbably-named Elisabeth Sparkle, is a intentionally era-blurring avatar of general-purpose superstar. She’s offered as an ebullient exercise-video host, kind of like Jane Fonda within the Nineteen Eighties, and—though it’s established in a fixed-camera passage-of-time montage that she has a star on the Hollywood Stroll of Fame—seems to be extra of a “character” than an actress. Regardless of being bodily slot in a method that many youthful folks would envy, Elisabeth continues to be a solidly middle-aged lady who is aware of her physique can solely be commodified for therefore lengthy; quickly sufficient, her superstar and her self-worth will slip additional away. So when she’s offered with the chance to strive a shadowy new drug identified solely as “the Substance”—an injectable able to unlocking her preferrred and most lovely self—she agrees, setting in movement a sci-fi/horror parable by which her dependence on this substance finally ends up hastening her downfall as a substitute of holding it off.
It’s arduous to pinpoint a “downfall” second in Moore’s real-life profession. She was within the aforementioned large hits, has labored steadily in movie and tv, wrote a popular memoir, and stays fairly well-known to at the present time. However her peak business interval didn’t outlast the ‘90s, and ended, oddly, with a one-two punch of solo star automobiles, as if audiences and press have been punishing her for standing on her personal. For the 1996 comedy Striptease, she turned the highest-paid actress to that time, receiving a wage of $12 million to play a beleaguered single mom who turns into an unique dancer, hoping to make sufficient cash to win again custody of her younger daughter. Then there was the 1997 drama G.I. Jane, a ardour undertaking she produced and efficiently recruited Ridley Scott to direct. It’s the film she cites in her guide as her biggest level of pleasure in a 40-year profession. Again within the ’90s, although, Striptease flopped, G.I. Jane underwhelmed, and that was that. Moore by no means led a big-studio film once more.
Unfair because the press might have been, it’s not arduous to grasp why neither film was a success. On purely cinematic phrases, they don’t seem to be satisfying. Her earnest Striptease character clashes with the sloppily translated zany crime-comedy tone of the Carl Hiaasen adaptation, whereas she blends in all too properly within the generic G.I. Jane, which is mainly High Gun with a feminist-but-not-too-feminist overlay. It’s all very late ’90s. However each films are, if something, extra fascinating in 2024, for causes that Roger Ebert was eager sufficient to quote in his optimistic G.I. Jane assessment again in 1997: “All of those ladies,” he wrote, referring to a number of Moore characters and the actress herself, “check the stress between a lady’s physique and a lady’s ambition and can.” Moore was, certainly, identified for her physique as a lot as her physique of labor, partially due to what she did in between Ghost in 1990 and A Few Good Males in 1992. Her largest cultural hit in 1991 wasn’t a film—Nothing However Bother, Mortal Ideas and The Butcher’s Spouse all stumbled on the field workplace that yr. No, it was her controversial, much-discussed and much-parodied August 1991 Self-importance Honest cowl, the place she appeared each extraordinarily pregnant and very bare—and in true blockbuster vogue, that cowl even spawned a sequel a yr later.
