“I had to commit to the part”: The one movie Demi Moore will always be proudest of
Demi Moore’s most transformative performance isn’t remembered for the right reasons.
The most shocking incident within the recent history of the Academy Awards occurred at the 2022 ceremony, in which Will Smith stepped on stage, shortly before winning the ‘Best Actor’ prize for his performance in King Richard, and attacked Chris Rock, who was presenting the award for ‘Best Documentary’ Feature.
Although the incident caused a serious debate in which Smith’s membership in the Academy was put on hold for over a decade, the joke that Rock had made may have slipped over the heads of many in the audience. He had been joking about Smith’s wife, who had her head shaved, by comparing her to the appearance of Demi Moore in Ridley Scott’s military thriller, GI Jane.
Released in 1997, the film starred Moore as a fictional soldier who attempts to break history by receiving special military training, and according to her, it was the most difficult performance of her career.
“I think very few people who aren’t athletes or members of the military themselves can truly grasp what I went through to transform myself to star in GI Jane,” she said, “It is the film I am most proud of, because it was the hardest for me to make—emotionally, physically, and mentally—and I had to commit to the part as much as I imagined my character, Lieutenant Jordan O’Neil, was committed to becoming the first female Navy SEAL.”
Scott is a filmmaker known for his intensity and commitment to realism, and he certainly gave Moore an opportunity to challenge herself by being cast against type. While she had suffered a run of box office misses, including the famous disasters Striptease and The Scarlet Letter, she was determined to take a role where she could be taken seriously, especially during a time in which military-centric action films were growing particularly popular, even if there was novelty in casting a female lead.
When it comes to male directors who have a track record for giving great opportunities to women, Scott is virtually unmatched, having helped create one of the greatest female heroes of all-time with Sigourney Weaver’s Ellen Ripley in the original 1979 Alien, and earned his first Academy Award nomination for ‘Best Director’ for the 1991 feminist masterpiece Thelma & Louise.
While he may have seemed like the perfect person to make GI Jane, the film simply didn’t come together in the right way and failed to capitalise on its ambitions, and while it isn’t necessarily a secret masterpiece, it’s competently made and features a strong turn from Moore. Scott is a director who never fails to deliver spectacle, and many of his films that initially earned mixed reviews upon release have subsequently been re-assessed; Kingdom of Heaven, The Counselor, Prometheus, and The Last Duel are just a handful of the films that he has directed that continue to age well, so GI Jane deserves to be held in the same regard.
It’s also fair to point out that Moore had been met with a wave of backlash by critics who refused to treat her as anything but an object of desire, and that she was doing something outside of her comfort zone should have earned her praise, but it instead meant she was subjected to ridicule. Given the career-defining comeback performance she gave recently in The Substance, there’s reason to go back and give GI Jane another shot.
