Demi Moore landed the first acting award of her career — yes, career — after taking home the Golden Globe for best actress in a motion picture, musical or comedy. She won for her go-for-broke performance as an aging celebrity in the body horror satire “The Substance.”
“I’m in shock right now. I’ve been doing this a long time — like, over 45 years — and this is the first time I’ve ever won anything as an actor,” Moore, 62, said from the stage at the Beverly Hilton in Los Angeles on Sunday night. “I’m so humbled and grateful.”
Moore has been nominated for four Globes across nearly 25 years, scoring prior nods for “Ghost” in 1991 and two for the anthology series “If These Walls Could Talk” in 1997. While she’s won an ensemble award at the Independent Spirit Award for 2012’s “Margin Call,” the prize for “The Substance” is, indeed, Moore’s only solo acting honor from a major awards body. In securing the prize for “The Substance,” Moore beat Amy Adams (“Nightbitch”), Cynthia Erivo (“Wicked”), Karla Sofía Gascón (“Emilia Perez”), Mikey Madison (“Anora”) and Zendaya (“Challengers”).
Popular on Variety
In her emotional speech, Moore, who rose to fame in the 1980s through films like “Blame It on Rio,” “St. Elmo’s Fire” and “About Last Night” before starring in ’90s box office successes such as “Ghost,” “A Few Good Men,” “Indecent Proposal” and “Disclosure,” reflected on her earlier days in Hollywood. She claimed a discouraging power broker had suggested to her that commercial acclaim and awards attention were mutually exclusive.
“Thirty years ago, I had a producer tell me I was a popcorn actress. At that time, I made that mean that this,” she said in reference to the shiny trophy in her hand, “is not something I was allowed to have. That I could do movies that were successful and made a lot of money, but that I couldn’t be acknowledged. I bought in, and I believed that. That corroded me over time, to the point where I thought a few years ago that maybe this was it. Maybe I had done what I was supposed to do.”
Moore revealed she was at a “low point” when a “magical, bold, courageous, out-of-the-box, absolutely bonkers script come across my desk.” She’s referring, of course, to director Coralie Fargeat’s “The Substance,” which has marked a career comeback for Moore. In the film, she plays Elisabeth Sparkle, a fading Hollywood star, turns 50 and uses a black market drug that literally splits her open to produce a younger, more perfect version of herself (played by Margaret Qualley). Naturally, the bootleg pharmaceutical leads to some unexpected side effects. The film, which received five Globe nominations in total, also scored at the global box office with $77.8 million against a $17.5 million budget.
“The universe told me: You are not done,” Moore said. She thanked “people who stood by me and believed in me when I haven’t believed in myself.”
She hoisted up her statue, referring to the hardware as “marker of my wholeness” and reminder that “I do belong,” before concluding with words of wisdom in regards to “The Substance.”
“In those moments when we don’t think we are smart enough or pretty enough or skinny enough or successful enough, or basically, just not enough,” Moore said. “I had a woman say to me, ‘Just know, you will never be enough, but you can know the value of your worth if you just put down the measuring stick.’”