Demi Moore is looking back on the attention she got from her Charlie’s Angels 2 bikini scene.
In a conversation with Michelle Yeoh for Interview magazine, published Tuesday, the actress reflected on feeling like there wasn’t a place for her in the industry amid the “heightened” conversation about her physical looks.
Moore was 40 years old when she filmed the 2003 sequel to Charlie’s Angels and recalled struggling with her identity given the attention she received for that bikini scene. Moore is 61 now.
“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. 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 explained.
When Yeoh added the question that possibly arose, “Where do I fit in?”, Moore agreed.
“Yeah, where do I fit in? It was a time that felt, not dead, but flat,” she said.
Yeoh chimed in, adding: “Hollywood is cruel to women of that age, where you don’t find the scripts or the characters that resonate with you anymore. It’s either, you are the mother or you’re old enough not to be sexy in their eyes. It’s like, why can’t a 45-year-old, a 50-year-old or 60-year-old, be sexy? But that whole perception is undergoing a lot of change because people like you and me won’t sit back and just take it.”
“No. And I don’t know if I’ve ever done that when I’ve come up against something that I don’t understand exists as a limitation,” Moore said.
Moore also praised Yeoh for her Oscar acceptance speech for Everything Everywhere All at Once for reminding her “that we can define where we want it to go and who we are.”
Moore added, “We don’t have to fight against that, we just have to believe that something else is possible. To me, what’s exciting is, in the film, I’m representing a past ideal and not what my present is.”
Moore stars in Coralie Fargeat’s horror film The Substance, which received an over nine-minute standing ovation at the Cannes Film Festival. In the film, Moore plays an acclaimed actress turned celebrity host of a daytime exercise program, who uses an experimental drug that is said to create a younger, better version of yourself. Margaret Qualley stars as the younger counterpart to Moore’s character. The film contains graphic scenes including Moore and Qualley having a naked, bloody fight.
While speaking at the press conference for the film at the festival, Moore said the role “pushed me out of the comfort zone” and that the explicit imagery “was necessary to tell this story.” Moore described the film as skewering “the male perspective of the ideal woman.”
Moore told Yeoh that after reading the script for the film, she felt that “it was such 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.”
She explained, “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. And for those who aren’t looking for such a deep message, it’s just entertaining.”
