Demi Moore Should Win an Award for Best Speech
Demi Moore won her first-ever acting award tonight and, boy, was she ready, locked and loaded with a rousing speech. It was memorized; it has sections. Accepting the award for Best Actress in a Musical or Comedy at the Golden Globe Awards for her performance as Elisabeth Sparkle in The Substance, the surprise win wasn’t enough of a surprise to stop her from giving the moment all she had. Moore, without reading from a single notecard, flawlessly recounted her career as a box-office draw who wasn’t taken seriously and thanked everyone who did graciously. “I do belong,” she concluded.
“Good luck to the next person,” Kerry Washington said before presenting the next award. It’s the kind of speech that should win you awards (like maybe Best Actress at the Oscars? TBD). Read her full speech below.
“Oh, wow! I really wasn’t expecting that. I’m just in shock right now. I’ve been doing this a long time, like, over 45 years, and this is the first time I’ve ever won anything as an actor. And I am just so humbled and so grateful. Thirty years ago I had a producer tell me that I was a popcorn actress, and at that time I made that mean that this is not something I was allowed to have. That I could do movies that were successful and made a lot of money, but that I couldn’t be acknowledged, and I bought in and I believed that. 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 had done what I was supposed to do. And as I was at kind of a low point, I had this magical, bold, courageous, out-of-the-box, absolutely bonkers script come across my desk called The Substance. And the universe told me that ‘you’re not done.’
And I am so grateful to Coralie for trusting me to step in and play this woman. For Margaret, for being the other half of me, that I couldn’t have done without, for looking out for me. To the people who have been with me for over 30 years. Kevin Huvane, Jason Weinberg, everybody at CAA, Untitled, all of the people who stood by me and believed in me when I haven’t believed in myself.
And I will just leave you with one thing that I think this movie is imparting. In those moments when we don’t think we are 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 worth if you just put down the measuring stick.’ So today I celebrate this as a marker of my wholeness and of the love that is driving me, and the gift of doing something I love and being reminded that I do belong. Thank you so much.”
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