Demi Moore is opening up about catching flak for wearing a bikini on the big screen back in the early ’00s, when she was in her 40s.
Speaking with fellow actor Michelle Yeoh for Interview magazine, the Hollywood star, 61, got candid about how her skin-baring scene in 2003’s “Charlie’s Angel: Full Throttle” ignited “a lot of talk about how I looked.”
“What’s interesting is I felt [criticism] more when I hit my 40s. I had done ‘Charlie’s Angels,’ and there was a lot of conversation around this scene in a bikini,” Moore said in the story published Tuesday.
“And then I found that there didn’t seem to be a place for me. I didn’t feel like I didn’t belong,” she continued. “It’s more like I felt that feeling of, I’m not 20, I’m not 30, but I wasn’t yet what they perceived as a mother.”
The “Ghost” leading lady said she’d questioned whether Hollywood was still her true calling, adding, “It was a time that felt, not dead, but flat.”
“There was a moment, I have to say, where I started to wonder, is this really what I should be doing? Maybe that part of my life is complete,” she said. “Not even over, but complete.”
Yeoh chimed in adding, “Hollywood is cruel to women of that age, where you don’t find the scripts or the characters that resonate with you anymore. It’s either, you are the mother or you’re old enough not to be sexy in their eyes. It’s like, why can’t a 45-year-old, a 50-year-old, or 60-year-old, be sexy?”
Moore starred as a supporting role in “Full Throttle,” which featured Cameron Diaz, Drew Barrymore and Lucy Liu as the film’s titular Angels.
The film followed 2000’s “Charlie’s Angels,” which is based on the 1976 action series of the same name. The movie was met with lackluster reviews, earning a mediocre 41% score on Rotten Tomatoes.
Moore is slated to star in the upcoming film “The Substance,” which follows an aging celebrity who experiments with a black-market drug that promises to revert her to a younger version of herself.
In May, Moore explained to IndieWire why she “really connected” with the role.
“If we step back from [The Substance] being about an actor, [the film is more about] a desire to have validation, to be seen, to be appreciated, to belong, and what it is to feel rejected and to feel not-enough, that there’s something wrong with you,” she explained.
Moore added, “When you add into it the aspect of aging — which is really about our inability to control — [it becomes] an exploration of a lack of acceptance of self.”