Demi Moore received her first solo acting award in 45 years at the 82nd Golden Globes, winning Best Actress in a Musical/Comedy for The Substance. With tears of joy, Moore said: “Oh wow. I really wasn’t expecting that. I’m just 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. I’m just so humbled and so grateful.”
Reflecting on her journey, Moore shared how a producer once called her a “popcorn actress,” which led her to question her worth in the industry. “At that time, I made that mean that this wasn’t something that I was allowed to have, that I could do movies that were successful, that made a lot of money, but that I couldn’t be acknowledged. And I bought in, and I believed that, and that corroded me over time, to the point where I thought a few years ago that maybe this was it, maybe I was complete, maybe I’ve done what I was supposed to do,” she said.
A turning point came when Moore received the script for The Substance, reigniting her passion. “And as I was at kind of a low point, I had this magical, bold, courageous, out of the box, absolutely bonkers script come across my desk called The Substance, and the universe told me that you’re not done.”
At the end of her speech, Moore told people: “I’ll just leave you with one thing that I think this movie is imparting is in those moments when we don’t think we’re smart enough or pretty enough or skinny enough or successful enough, or basically just not enough.” She reflected on a woman’s advice: “Just know you will never be enough, but you can know the value of your worth if you just put down the measuring stick.”
Moore ended with a powerful statement of self-affirmation: “So today, I celebrate this as a marker of my wholeness and of the love that is driving me and for the gift of doing something I love and being reminded that I do belong. Thank you so much.”
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Demi Moore is taking home the award for Best Female Actor – Motion Picture – Musical/Comedy for The Substance. Congrats! 🎉 #GoldenGlobes pic.twitter.com/cUXNNSmX7O
— Golden Globes (@goldenglobes) January 6, 2025
Moore won the Robert Altman Award in 2012 as part of the ensemble cast of Margin Call. Earlier, she had been nominated for a Golden Globe solely as an individual. This was in 1991 for Ghost and in 1997 for If These Walls Could Talk.
NDTV film critic Saibal Chatterjee described the portrayal of Moore in The Substance as a woman falling into an eerie and ominous world: “Demi Moore projects Elisabeth as a woman who walks through a vertical trap door into a surreal, subterranean universe where the more she seeks to wrest back control of her life the more she descends into a bottomless chute.”
