Demi Moore is sharing how she felt after hearing she didn’t win the Oscar for best actress for her highly-praised performance in “The Substance.”
Going into the 97th Academy Awards, which was held on March 2, Moore was seen as a frontrunner for the best actress category in light of her already-successful awards show season. But ultimately, it was Mikey Madison who took home the Oscar for her role in “Anora.”
During a Time100 Summit panel in New York City on April 23, Moore addressed not winning the Oscar, and described her initial reaction before she had a change in perspective.
Moderator Lucy Feldman, Time’s editorial director, mentioned that she had spoken to multiple people who said Moore should’ve won the Oscar. She then asked Moore if she envisions herself one day holding the golden trophy on stage.
“I think that would be nice,” Moore, who had her dog Pilaf on her lap, replied as the audience laughed.
“The question of, ‘Should I have won,’ is certainly not the perspective of how I hold it,” she continued. “Because I didn’t. I really do subscribe to this idea that everything in life is happening for me, not to me.”
The 62-year-old actor said that outlook doesn’t mean she doesn’t struggle or that everything goes the way she hopes.
“But when I look at it through that lens, it allows me to step back and say, ‘What is this trying to give me?’” she explained.
Moore acknowledged she did hear projections that she would win the Oscar for her role in “The Substance.”
“So, of course there’s disappointment,” she shared. “I also immediately recognize that there is something that is greater that I am to be in service to, even if I don’t know what that is. There is a reason.”
She also praised Madison’s leading role in “Anora” and that she gave “an incredible performance.”
“It’s an odd thing for there to be a competition, anyway,” Moore pointed out.
She emphasized the lesson she took away from not winning.
“If I had won … it would be like a completion to what had started,” the “Ghost” star said. “And clearly the message here is that there’s more work to be done. That this issue is not complete.”
As she finished answering the question, she joked, “And I’m sorry to everyone who had hopes for me,” while the crowd chuckled.
“Because I did feel a collective disappointment that felt like it was even bigger than me,” she added.
In January, Moore accepted a Golden Globe Award for her role in “Substance.” In her speech, she revealed that it was the first time she had “ever won anything” in acting for over four decades.
Moore also reflected on a discouraging conversation she previously had with a producer about her potential.
“Thirty years ago, I had a producer tell me that I was a popcorn actress. 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 and made a lot of money, but that I couldn’t be acknowledged and I bought in, and I believed that,” she recalled.
“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’d done what I was supposed to do.”
But Moore said she was reinvigorated by “The Substance,” a sci-fi horror flick in which she plays an aging Hollywood actor who takes a drug to create a younger version of herself.
“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,’” Moore said. “And the universe told me, ‘You’re not done.’”
