“I was never comfortable”: the one-off 1988 role Demi Moore called “torture” to perform
Having a baby is a physical insanity that women should be given awards for doing, quite frankly, let alone managing anything else on top, like working.
In the US, the average amount of maternity leave is a pathetic ten weeks, which means mothers are expected to basically pop out a helpless newborn and then almost immediately start commuting to an office. And even celebrities need to cope with that kind of nonsense, as Demi Moore discovered when she became a mother.
In the late 1980s, Moore was about as big a star as you could find in Hollywood. Arguably the most successful graduate of the ‘Brat Pack’ that had dominated the industry in the middle of the decade, she’d had massive success with films like St Elmo’s Fire and About Last Night with Rob Lowe, and things were about to get even more (ha!) crazy for her with Ghost and Indecent Proposal in the years to come.
But in between, around 1988, Moore was juggling being pregnant with her first child with Bruce Willis, the future actor Rumer, and making a not very well-received horror film called The Seventh Sign. Once she’d had her baby, she was determined to conform to industry standards and bounce back to her former self as fast as possible, a decision that ended up clashing with her appearance on one of America’s biggest shows.
Moore recalled: “Within three months, I’d lost all the pregnancy weight, plus another eight pounds. I was invited to host Saturday Night Live right around then, and the writers actually got me to base my whole opening monologue around the line, ‘I had a baby just twelve weeks ago, and look at me!’ I was never comfortable with that conceit, but at that time I didn’t have the confidence to push back.”
The SNL producers wouldn’t take no for an answer. Repeatedly telling Moore that if she would just commit to the ‘humour’, the speech would go down a storm, they pushed the material through.
Moore added, ”Performing that monologue was torture. It was terrifying enough getting in front of a live audience and essentially doing stand-up comedy, and honestly, I was afraid the joke was on me.”
In the end, by the time the show wrapped that night, Moore felt comfortable enough that she believed, given the chance again, she would have stamped her authority on the appearance. But as it was, it certainly didn’t hamper her ascent to becoming the most in-demand female actor in Hollywood. Between 1990 and 1996, she led movies that brought in more than $1.5bn at the box office, including A Few Good Men with Tom Cruise and Jack Nicholson, Disclosure with Michael Douglas, and the controversial Striptease for which she received an unprecedented salary of $12.5m.
After an extended period out of the limelight, Moore returned with an astonishing performance in 2024’s Substance, picking up a ‘Best Actress’ Academy Award nomination and winning a Golden Globe. She recently starred in the Taylor Sheridan-created series Landman with Billy Bob Thornton and is about to start filming a sci-fi movie with Euphoria’s Colman Domingo called Strange Arrivals, which is described as an alien abduction-themed romance.
