After nearly five decades in Hollywood, Demi Moore won her first major acting award tonight — Best Female Actor in a Motion Picture (Musical/Comedy) — at the 2025 Golden Globes for her performance in The Substance. “I’ve been doing this a long time, for over 45 years, and this is the first time I’ve ever won anything as an actor,” Moore said in her acceptance speech. “I’m just in shock right now,” Moore continued, and so are we … Demi Moore has never won any acting awards? Really??
Surprisingly, no, she hasn’t. At least not at any of the major awards shows. Moore received a 1993 Golden Globe nomination for Ghost but didn’t win. (She did win a People’s Choice for the role, though!) She received Golden Globe and Emmy nominations for her role in the 1997 miniseries If These Walls Could Talk but didn’t win those either. She was also nominated for a Screen Actors Guild award in 2007 for Bobby and was part of the cast of Margin Call, which was awarded a Robert Altman Award at the Independent Spirit Awards in 2012. Unsurprisingly, Moore does not count her 1994 MTV Movie Award for Best Kiss in Indecent Proposal as an achievement in acting, but it bears mentioning.
“Thirty years ago, I had a producer tell me that I was a ‘popcorn actress,’” Moore continued in her speech, which she took to mean she wasn’t “allowed to have” recognition as an actor. “I bought in and I believed that,” she said. “That corroded me over time to the point where I thought a few years ago that maybe this was it, maybe I was complete, maybe I’d done what I was supposed to do.” What changed? The “absolutely bonkers script” for psychological thriller/body horror The Substance came across her desk. Moore said, “The universe told me I wasn’t done”
The Substance follows celebrity aerobics instructor Elisabeth Sparkle (Moore) who is fired from her job after her 50th birthday. Sparkle starts taking an experimental anti-aging drug, which allows her to temporarily live as a much younger version of herself. Body horror ensues. Moore alluded to those themes in her Golden Globes acceptance speech: “In those moments, when we don’t think we’re smart enough or pretty enough or skinny enough, or successful enough, or basically just not enough, I had a woman say to me, ‘Just know, you will never be enough, but you can know the value of your own worth if you just put down the measuring stick.’”
“Today, I celebrate this as a marker of my wholeness,” she ended, “and of the love that is driving me, and for the gift of doing something I love, and being reminded that I do belong.” We’ll find out if her lucky streak continues with a first-time Oscar nod when the 2025 Academy Awards nominations are announced on January 17.
