The Popcorn Actress Is Ready For Revenge

By all accounts, Demi Moore probably shouldn’t be the one to watch during the 2025 awards season circuit. Not that she doesn’t deserve the attention for her work in The Substance—quite the opposite—it’s just that she has the odds stacked against her. Firstly, the body horror of it all. The genre—heavy on gore—typically is considered niche and not in line with the Academy’s intellectual point of view. And secondly, because it’s Demi Moore, a self-proclaimed a “popcorn actress,” from whom big box office hits are expected, not so much critical acclaim. As if the two things have be diametrically opposed.

Moore wasn’t supposed to win the Golden Globe either—it’s taken her three nominations and more than 45 years of working in Hollywood to achieve it and yet, at 62 years old, she took home the coveted statuette and called out the producer (whom it is impossible not to visualize with Dennis Quaid’s face in The Substance) who made her believe that her work was second rate.

“I feel very honored and grateful. Thirty years ago, a producer told me I was a ‘popcorn actress’ and I thought that meant this was something I wasn’t allowed to have. That I could make very successful films that made a lot of money, but I wasn’t going to be recognized. […] There came a moment when I thought that that was it, that maybe I was complete and that I had done what I was supposed to do,” she said in her widely-covered acceptance speech.

It’s true that Moore is a tried-and-true movie star, often appearing in blockbuster films rather than auteur cinema or indies, but there’s no denying her deep talent and the gravitas she lends to roles in movies like Ghost, An Indecent Proposal, A Few Good Men, and more. And it’s finally being recognized.

As far as performances go, 2025 is a year of renaissance (or revenge, depending on how you look at it) for actresses that also could be considered “popcorn” by industry standards, i.e., over-40 starlets that have been working for decades in the entertainment arena and have a mixed-bag of genres under their belts. Moore, Zoe Saldana, Angelina Jolie, and Pamela Anderson come to mind, each off which have been heaped with praise and nominations for their roles in movies this year. Younger stars with two feet firmly planted in popular culture also proved their serious-acting chops—namely Ariana Grande—have also been rewarded.