Demi Moore on Full Frontal Nudity With Margaret Qualley in ‘The Substance’: ‘A Very Vulnerable Experience’ but I Had a ‘Great Partner Who I Felt Very Safe With’
Demi Moore‘s new film, the feminist body horror “The Substance,” sees her bare it all, with several scenes featuring full nudity. At the Cannes Film Festival press conference for the film on Monday, the 61-year-old actor discussed the “vulnerable experience.”
“Going into it, it was really spelled out — the level of vulnerability and rawness that was really required to tell the story,” Moore said. “And it was a very vulnerable experience and just required a lot of sensitivity and a lot of conversation about what we were trying to accomplish.”
The star credited costar Margaret Qualley for putting her at ease when it came to stripping down.
“We obviously were quite close – naked – and we also got a lot of levity in those moments at how absurd those certain situations were,” said Moore. “But ultimately, it’s just about really directing your communication and mutual trust.”
In the film from “Revenge” helmer Coralie Fargeat, Moore plays a fading celebrity who uses a black market drug the film is named for — a cell-replicating device that winds up creating a young, better version of herself (Margaret Qualley).
Not only must she share a space with this new creature, she has to spend half her time in a dormant state so the other can thrive. In an early scene when Qualley is “birthed” so to speak, Moore spends a long time studying her nude body before pulling the trigger on the drug.
When Qualley emerges, she too marvels at her supple new skin suit. It’s a stark but perhaps necessary display of full-frontal for both.
‘The Substance’ Review:
Margaret Qualley Helps Demi Moore Feel Young Again in an Epic, Audacious, and Insanely Gross Body Horror Masterpiece
An immensely, unstoppably, ecstatically demented fairy tale about female self-hatred, Coralie Fargeat’s “The Substance” will stop at nothing — and I mean nothing — to explode the ruthless beauty standards that society has inflicted upon women for thousands of years, a burden this camp-adjacent instant classic aspires to cast off with some of the most spectacularly disgusting body horror this side of “The Fly” or the final minutes of “Akira.”
If the “Revenge” director’s immaculately crafted debut tried to dismantle male toxicity with a shotgun blast square to the balls, Fargeat’s Cannes-approved follow-up turns that same attention inwards, allowing her to take aim at both the pointlessness she’s been conditioned to feel as a forty-something woman, and also at the resentment she’s been conditioned to feel toward her younger self.
Squelching with fury at how a woman’s “fuckability” is used as the ultimate measure of her worth, the result of Fargeat’s mad experiment is equal parts “Freaky Friday,” “All About Eve,” and Andrzej Żuławski’s “Possession” — simple enough for a child to understand, but gross enough to make squeamish adults spew out their lunch.
Those with the stomach to stick it out will be rewarded with the most sickly entertaining theatrical experience of the year, one carried by the kind of go-for-broke performance that Hollywood stars only tend to give after they reach a certain age and start running out of options.