Demi Moore is confident in her own skin at 61, but it admittedly took awhile to get there.
“I put so much pressure on myself,” Moore recalled during the Sunday, September 22, episode of CBS Sunday Morning. “I did have experiences of being told to lose weight. And all of those, while they may have been embarrassing and humiliating, it’s what I did to myself because of that.”
When Moore was filming 1993’s Indecent Proposal, she used to ride a bike to and from her Malibu home, 30 miles away from set. Moore was also postpartum, having welcomed second daughter Scout in 1991. (Along with Scout, 33, Moore shares daughters Rumer, 36, and Tallulah, 30, with ex-husband Bruce Willis.)
“I think she was, like, five or six months old when we were shooting [Indecent Proposal]. So, I was feeding her through the night, getting up in the dark with a trainer, with headlamp, biking all the way to Paramount, wherever, even on location where we were shooting; then shooting a full day, which is usually a 12-hour day; and then starting all over again,” Moore remembered. “Even just the idea of, like, what I did to my body, it’s, like, so crazy, so ridiculous.”
According to the actress, she thought that was required of her at the time.
“But, you look back and you kinda go, ‘Did it really matter that much?’ Probably not,” she quipped. “But at the time, I made it mean everything.”
Moore previously struggled with self-esteem, which sometimes still affects her. Speaking with CBS broadcast Tracy Smith on Sunday, the Substance star admits “it fluctuates.”
“Some days I look and I’m like, ‘Wow. That’s pretty good.’ And some days, I catch myself dissecting, hyper-focusing on, you know, things that I don’t like,” Moore confessed. “The difference is, now I can catch myself. I can go, ‘Yeah, I don’t like that loose skin. But, you know, it is what it is. So, I’m gonna make the best of what is, as opposed to chasing what isn’t.’”
Moore further recalled that she used to hyper-focus on her apparently “chubby” face that lacked angles.
She added, “Then you’re like, ‘Yeah, but now it’s, like, loose! I wouldn’t mind some of that chubbiness back, in the right places!’”
Moore also fought for her character in The Substance, an aging movie star, to embrace her natural appearance. In one scene, Moore purposefully smears her perfectly applied makeup in the mirror before leaving for a date.
“Emotionally, that idea that I think many of us have been where we’re trying to make something better and then we just keep making it worse,” Moore said on Sunday. “For me, it’s one of the most heart-wrenching moments in the whole film. And it was at least 15 takes each time. And so, by the end, my face was raw.”
The Substance is now in theaters.
