Demi Moore Just Explained Her Acting Hiatus & It Has Everything to Do With This Hollywood Standard
From Ghost and G.I. Jane to the latest season of Feud, Demi Moore has quite a long-spanning career. But while her career is undoubtedly impressive, she’s often taken breaks between major projects before hopping on a new one.
In a new interview with fellow Hollywood icon Michelle Yeoh for Interview Magazine, Moore looked back at those breaks and explained what they were all about.
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“I hear people say, ‘It’s a comeback for Demi.’ I say, ‘I don’t think she ever left. She just went quiet for a little while waiting for the right script to come along,'” Yeoh told Moore. “But it’s not like, ‘I’m coming out of retirement,’ which is bulls–.”
Moore, for her part, completely agreed. “Which by the way, they’ve said a few times about me,” she said. “It’s not that I wasn’t doing things, but there wasn’t something that had that juice and depth.”
In other words, Moore wasn’t intentionally taking time off to focus on a vacation or spend time with her family. Instead, she was just waiting until a project that was sufficiently interesting and challenging came along.
Her new movie The Substance, for example, was the perfect instance of that. In the movie, Moore plays an actress-turned-aerobics-workout-host who goes to extreme lengths after getting fired from a TV network because she was too old, per Variety.
Talking to Yeoh, she reflected on why the movie, which critiques the lack of space in Hollywood for older women, meant so much.
“What’s interesting is I felt [the sexism] more when I hit my forties,” she said. “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,” she reflected. “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.”
“Where do I fit in?” Moore questioned. “It was a time that felt, not dead, but flat.”
Yeoh, who last year reached new heights in her critical acclaim winning Best Actress at the Oscars for her role in Everything Everywhere All at Once, couldn’t agree more.
“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,” she stated. “It’s like, why can’t a 45-year-old, a 50-year-old, or 60-year-old, be sexy?”
Luckily, that’s where movies like Anne Hathaway’s The Idea of You and Nicole Kidman’s The Family Affair and the upcoming Babygirl come in.
“But that whole perception is undergoing a lot of change because people like you and me won’t sit back and just take it,” Yeoh added. Indeed, it seems like Hollywood is starting to finally pay attention!
Before you go, click here and check out these TV shows about women over 50.
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