Demi Moore recalls how ‘Charlie’s Angels’ bikini scene affected her: ‘A lot of talk about how I looked’
Demi Moore is getting candid about filming that bikini scene in “Charlie’s Angels: Full Throttle.”
The 61-year-old spoke to Interview magazine on Tuesday and said she struggled with her identity after starring in the 2003 sequel to “Charlie’s Angels.”
“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,” Moore, who married Ashton Kutcher two years later in 2005, recalled.
The “Landman” star felt “there didn’t seem to be a place for me.”
“I didn’t feel like I didn’t belong,” Moore clarified. “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.”
In the action film, Moore played a former Angel with a hidden secret who meets Cameron Diaz’s character at a beach stakeout.
Diaz, 51, donned a white two-piece, while Demi wore a black string bikini.
Fellow actress Michelle Yeoh, 62, took a moment to acknowledge Moore’s experience, 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.”
A concept the “Feud: Capote vs. the Swans” alum is exploring in her newest film, “The Substance.”
The sci-fi thriller, which hits theaters Sept. 20, follows Hollywood star Elisabeth Sparkle (Moore) as she takes an experimental drug advertised to create a younger version of herself — a clone Sue (Margaret Qualley).
The official synopsis teases the fictional drug’s magic, reading: “It generates another you. A new, younger, more beautiful, more perfect, you. And there’s only one rule: You share time. One week for you. One week for the new you. Seven days each. A perfect balance. Easy. Right? If you respect the balance … what could possibly go wrong?”
Moore told the outlet she was “moved” after she read the script, “because 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.”
“At the core of it, what it’s really about is what we do to ourselves,” she continued, “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.”
This isn’t the first time Moore reflected on the evolution of aging in Hollywood throughout the years.
“It has shifted,” she told Variety in June. “There’s evolution that has occurred, even, I would say from when I was 40. Because when I was 40 but didn’t look like what they imagined 40 should look like, they didn’t know what to do with me.”
Moore concluded: “I didn’t actually work that much, because I wasn’t 20 or 30. I think if we really look at the deeper crux of this, what we’re looking at is this old idea that women’s value and desirability was tied to their fertility.”