Demi Moore opened up about her past struggles with her body image in Elle, telling the magazine that a Hollywood producer “pulled me aside” to ask her to lose weight “multiple times,” which was “embarrassing and humiliating.”
Moore, 62, has been candid about her “obsession” with “working out,” which she wrote in her 2019 memoir Inside Out “consumed me for five years.”
She also wrote that it began when she became fixated with fitting into the military uniform her character wore in A Few Good Men, mere few months after giving birth.
The Substance star told Elle that the movie producer—whom she did not name or reveal which film they worked on together—repeatedly calling attention to her weight propelled her into a dark period.
“I internalized it,” she said, “it moved me to a place of such torture and harshness against myself, of real extreme behaviors, and that I placed almost all the value of who I was on my body being a certain way.”
Moore acknowledged that the interactions she had with that unnamed producer were “just one thing” that contributed to “a lot of torment I put myself through when I was younger,” like her eating disorder and the extreme exercise.
She was only relieved of her obsession after she filmed GI Jane, she wrote in her memoir, as she “had an epiphany” that she “just needed to be [her] natural size.”
Navigating Hollywood was still difficult, she told the magazine, because suddenly she was not young enough to be hired for “sexy” roles or old enough to fit the industry’s mom roles. “I wasn’t 20 or 30, but I wasn’t what they imagined 40 or 50 was either,” Moore told Elle. “They didn’t quite know where I fit, and that’s not just something I made up. That was conveyed to me.”
That said, at age 62 and fresh off a buzzy new film, Moore said “I’m amazed that I still get to do this. I am still amazed that this is where my life has taken me.”
