Demi Moore covers PEOPLE’s World’s Most Beautiful issue, which is the equivalent to Sexiest Man Alive without the campy reveal and endless debate. We also don’t track it like we do the SMA – last year it was Sofia Vergara and before that, Helen Mirren. Solid choices we aren’t going to argue over.
That’s not the point of World’s Most Beautiful, this is a slam-dunk title. And with Demi, they got the slam dunk. The face card has been active since the mid-80s and she has lived so many lives in front of us: half of a mega A-list movie star couple, an uneven film career, a retreat to Idaho to raise her children, the Charlie’s Angels comeback and once again, being part of a mega A-list couple. Demi literally wrote the book on herself so there isn’t much for newness for PEOPLE to squeeze but when the story is this long and this good, we aren’t looking for bombshells.
At the end of a really strong Oscar campaign at the end of which she didn’t win, Demi said she is happy and at peace. About the Oscars, yes, it was a slight surprise when she didn’t take it home but this is the Oscars. Angela Bassett lost. Annette Bening has never won. An Oscar isn’t always an indication of how much work or how much respect a person has in the business – sometimes it’s just a numbers game and her numbers came up short. Looking ahead, winner Mikey Madison has a harder road ahead than Demi Moore now. Winning an Oscar that young can be challenging.
And if Demi’s comeback has shown us anything, it’s that comebacks actually take a really long time. It’s not a linear process – she was BACK with Charlie’s Angel, but the work didn’t follow. With The Substance, the work is at the forefront and her personal life is in the backseat.
Think about it – when was the last time we heard anything about Demi Moore that wasn’t work-related? There’s her family life, which is well documented with Bruce Willis and the kids, but there’s been zero (legit) gossip for a long stretch. This is what’s been so interesting about her Comeback Part II: there’s no movie star on her arm. She has gone the distance, hitting every red carpet from LA to Cannes, with her team and Pilaf.
Speaking of Pilaf (who is a registered service animal), she gets a shoutout of course. And the piece presents Demi as she wants (she’s been famous for decades, she knows what she wants to say) and hopefully where she is at: at peace, calm, understanding that over the years a lot of the discussion around Demi Moore is about survival. Look up the biggest actresses from her early years; we haven’t seen work from most of them for years, some decades. Was that a conscious choice, to step away, or did the industry make that choice for them? Demi has seen both sides of that - leaving because there wasn’t room for her to make the work she wanted and coming back to a business that is changed on the surface but ultimately still prizes youth and beauty above all else. She has contemporaries like Brad Pitt, Meg Ryan, Tom Cruise and Julia Roberts, but no one has quite fell out of favour for so long and made it back like Demi.
