STORY AND PHOTOS BY KAREN BOSSICK

Demi Moore’s nude photograph taken when pregnant that appeared on a 1991 Vanity Fair cover was a societal game changer, making it more acceptable to appear in public when pregnant and making pregnancy photos fashionable. And now she’s making waves with a body horror movie in which she portrays the grey gnarled fingers of a former star aging before her time.

She talked about both of those—and her love for Sun Valley, which she considers her sanctuary—in two appearances this past week on behalf of the Sun Valley Film Festival.

Moore, who was honored with the film festival’s Vision Award, spent an hour in conversation during a free Coffee Talk at The Argyros. And she fielded questions following a sold-out screening of her new movie “The Substance” the night before.

“I know that was a lot!” she quipped as the credits rolled on the film, which portrays a fading star’s decision to inject herself with a black-market substance to recapture her youthful beauty.

Indeed, the film is a lot to take in, from Dennis Quaid’s repugnant portrayal of the stereotypical Hollywood mogul who casts off female stars the moment they lose an eyelash to the gruesome way in which a younger starlet merges from the body of TV fitness star Elisabeth Sparkle and the even more gruesome way that Moore is transformed into an ugly monster after the younger star snubs her to take advantage of her soaring popularity.

But Moore’s performance has earned her a Golden Globe nomination for Best Actress and a Best Supporting Actress nomination for Margaret Qualley, who plays the starlet. Nominations also have been awarded for Best Motion Picture—musical or comedy, Director and Best Screenplay.

Moore said she found “The Substance” a unique out-of-box way of delving into the subject matter.

“The battle with self is at the heart of it. It’s about the values and horror we have towards our bodies,”

she said. “What made me want to be in it was how there is this violence against ourselves and ideas of compare and despair.”

Moore said the script contained very long, detailed descriptions because there is so little dialogue. It took six to nine hours to put on the prosthetics by the end of the movie and another hour and a half to remove them. But that gave her the stillness to move into the different body and change herself into character.

“I saw a few cuts and wasn’t sure where it was going,” she said. “It could have been terrible if not handled in the right way. Up until Cannes, I still had no idea and was uncertain of the ending until I hear people laughing. I trusted in my director’s vision and in myself and Margaret.”

Moore said she’d had a similar response to reading “Ghost,” which turned out to be a blockbuster movie with Patrick Swayze. “It had both comedy and melodrama and I thought it could be a disaster. That’s the way I felt about ‘The Substance-that it was trying to combine so many things that if anything off it would be a disaster.”

Moore described how she was first introduced to Hollywood when she was 15.

“I had just moved into an apartment in West Hollywood with my crazy mother and I looked down and saw the most extraordinary creature who seemed so comfortable in her own body and I wanted to be her.”

The young German actress brought to the United States by Roman Polanski didn’t have the confidence she needed to read scripts so she asked Moore to help her. “It was my first experience with this new world. I had no experience with acting but—”

Moore got a role on the soap opera General Hospital in 1981 on her 19th birthday. Due to a writer’s strike daytime TV was the only new content being produced so it rose to the occasion. She had no training in acting and the role required 20 to 30 pages of dialogue daily. But there were plenty of teleprompters.

“We knew when the camera wasn’t on us so we could quickly look.”

In 1985 Moore landed a role in “St. Elmo’s Fire” about the misadventures of college students. But the producers wouldn’t let her start until she got help for her substance abuse.

“They said, ‘What’s more important—this movie or your life?’ I said: The movie. But they worked it so I could start the movie with 15 days of sobriety. I didn’t have enough value to myself without that.”

“St. Elmo’s Fire constituted a shift in the movie industry and a cultural shift where young voices were being heard, she said: “It was very exciting to be part of something that we see today as norm.”

Moore’s portrayal of a grieving artist in the romance thriller “Ghost” was a success, but the reviews were awful, she recounted.

“And, since, I have never read them. I’ve stuck to what my experience was as opposed to the outside reception.”

Moore had further success with “A Few Good Men,” a movie about a military lawyer defending two Marines charged with murder. She auditioned for it alongside Tom Cruise when she was eight months pregnant and, she said, was impressed with how Jack Nicholson gave 110 percent all day long.

Annie Leibovitz took the Vanity Fair photograph of her at the same time, and it ended up being one of Leibovitz’s most memorable photos. Moore said Leibovitz was doing a photo shoot for an article about how Moore was feeling more comfortable in her own body than she’d ever been.

“She did this shot for me—it was not for the magazine. Two weeks later they asked if I was okay with it being used.”

Moore considered how her grandmother had told a story about a pregnant lady coming to church only to have people say she should stay home. “In the 1950s they celebrated when the baby was announced and when the baby was born. You were supposed to hide in between,” she said.

That memory triggered her rebellious side and she consented and was gratified at the lasting impact that decision had.

“I gave birth a week and a half later after a two and a half-hour hike, a 24-mile bike ride and dancing at a reggae concert with Carole King where my water broke,” she said.

Moore added that she gave birth at the old hospital in Hailey where she was the only patient: “Where else would that happen?”

Moore said her former husband Bruce Willis brought property in the Wood River Valley after falling in love with while recuperating from a ski accident. For years, she said, he made the daily commute up the highway taking her daughters to the Community School.

Sun Valley has become her sanctuary, she said, and she tries to be here as much as possible.

“It has become the place where I feel more at home than anywhere else. Surrounded by the Sawtooth Mountains…the quiet, except for the Big Wood River…it gives a sense of peace.”

Moore said she wrote her New York Times best-selling memoir “Inside Out” to help her daughters understand the parts of her life they didn’t know.

“They saw me more as a person, they saw my humanity,” she said. “There’s been conversations about an update, but I need to live a little more.”

In the mid-90s Moore produced and starred alongside Sissy Spacek and Cher in a groundbreaking HBO miniseries about back-alley abortions called “If These Walls Could Talk” for which she received two Golden Globe nominations. She currently is in Taylor Sheridan’s drama series “Landman” about the oil business

“Taylor Sheriden writes wonderfully complex characters,” she said, adding that she lost a young cousin in an oil rig accident.

Moore said she never did take formal acting classes.

“I thought if I went to acting class and they said, ‘You’re bad,’ I would not make it. If I went to an audition, there could be a lot of reasons I didn’t get a role. It was my way of protecting myself.”

Asked what advice she’d give budding actors: “Follow your passion and don’t be anybody but you—that’s who they want to see,” she said. “And one ‘No’ does not make an entire ‘No.’ ”

SUN VALLEY FILM FESTIVAL MOVES TO DECEMBER 2025

The Sun Valley Film Festival’s four-day Winter Screening Series was created in the interlude between the last full-length Festival in March 2024 and the new time in December 2025. The five screenings included one of “The Last Showgirl, “for which Pamela Anderson fielded questions afterwards.

The Sun Valley Film Festival will continue with its Monthly Movie Series throughout the coming months, including a free screening of “Dear Santa” at 5:30 p.m. Sunday, Dec. 22, at Merlin’s Magic Lantern.