Demi Moore is proud of wrangling the “vulnerability and rawness” her latest role required.
The Ghost actor stars opposite Margaret Qualley in The Substance, a new feminist body horror flick that just premiered at the Cannes Film Festival.
When asked how she managed to pull off the film’s nude scenes — some of which also involve violence — Demi credited her 29-year-old co-star.
“It was a very vulnerable experience and just required, I think, going into it with a sensitivity and a lot of conversation,” she said at the press conference for the film on Monday.
“I think finding that common ground of mutual trust [helps].”
“And I had someone who was a great partner who I felt very safe with,” Demi continued. “We obviously were quite close in certain moments, naked, and it allowed us also a lot of levity … at how absurd those certain situations were, with us lying on the tile floor.”
The Emmy nominee added that it’s “ultimately” about “communication and mutual trust” on sets like Substance, which tackles themes of envy and longing for youth. In the film, she plays an aging celebrity who resorts to a fictional drug to clone herself as a younger, prettier version — which leads to horrific, unintended consequences.
Director Coralie Fargeat – whose feature-length debut film “Revenge” (2017) tackled similar issues – recently told Variety that body horror is “the perfect vehicle to express the violence all these women’s issues are about” in wake of the #MeToo era.
The premiere reportedly earned Cannes’ longest standing ovation of this year at 13 minutes.
As the film progresses, Demi’s character is increasingly disfigured by Margaret’s — and ends up as an abomination of her own making.
“It’s almost like I’m watching myself in a slightly removed way,” she said Monday about the prosthetics used to help portray her transformation.
“It’s strange, there were days, after six to eight hours of makeup, I could see my eyes and know it was me but, the best part is my little dog … always recognised me.”
Demi added that, while it required a deep “willingness to expose” herself “emotionally and physically,” she emerged from the shoot “in greater acceptance” of her own body. For filmmaker Coralie, the film is merely “a little stone in the huge wall” that feminists “still have to build”.
“I hope my film will also be one of the stones of that wall,” she told Variety on Thursday. “That’s really what I indexed to do with it. To me, I still feel like we need a bigger revolution regarding all this and we are clearly not there yet.”