Demi Moore looks back at her Vanity Fair cover “Pregnant,” “Ghost,” and “Stripease”

Demi Moore takes a walk down memory lane.

In a Interview Magazine In the story published on September 11, 2024, the 61-year-old actress addressed comments she made in the magazine back in July 1996 about the public's reaction to some of her most controversial films and her infamous 1991 film. Vanity Fair Cover.

Moore made headlines in 1996 with her $12.5 million salary for stripteasewhich made her the highest paid actress in Hollywood history. At the time, she told interview that she was proud of the record payday, “because it could have happened to anyone.”

“What I was really trying to say is that it happened to be me, but the bigger point is that it happened,” she said, reflecting on the 1996 quote. “It was a turning point for women to basically earn the same amount, but it was reduced to the idea that it was worth less because I was playing a stripper.”

She also reflected on the audience reaction to the film and in 1997 GI Jane.

“For me, [Striptease] was about a mother trying to survive and take care of her child, and it turned out that stripping was a means to an end,” she said. “Because I did two films back to back, striptease and then GI Janeand at the same time there was all this press about me becoming the highest paid actress. I think that one film was seen in some ways as a betrayal of women and the other was seen as a betrayal of men. At that point, they just weren't willing to let that win. I just happened to be the symbol that held it at that moment.”

She also said that her 1996 comments, striptease “changed my perception of myself” is still true today.

“It was terrifying for me to play that role, to be on a stage, to be a stripper, to take off my clothes,” she explained in the new story. “It empowered me in a way that had less to do with those I was dancing for and more to do with how I experienced myself.”

In the 1996 interview, Moore also dismissed negative criticism of her film performances, although interviewHal Rubenstein noted: Spirit was an exception.

And today, in the present, Moore has a different opinion.”Spirit “I got terrible reviews,” she said. “I remember seeing the film and thinking it was great, and then the first few reviews were terrible. I was so upset because I suddenly thought, 'I don't know if I can trust myself because I liked it?' At that moment I decided not to read reviews because you have to give equal weight to the good and the bad.”

From her 1991 Vanity Fair On the cover of the film, which features the then heavily pregnant actress naked, Moore said in 1996 that she had not known that the photos would trigger such a “level of controversy”.

Today she revealed that she was already seven months pregnant when the magazine asked her to be on the cover.

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“Of course we took some pictures clothed, but at the end of the shoot we took others of me naked. I remember [photographer Annie Leibovitz]”Wouldn't it be great if they used that for the cover?'” Moore recalled. “Two weeks later, Annie called me and said, 'Hey, I'm sending you the picture. How about they use that for the cover? Or we could use the picture of you holding your hand over your chest.'”

“It's not that I was completely naive, but I never imagined it would have such an impact,” she said, echoing comments she made in 1996. “Because I was just expressing how I felt – that women didn't have the opportunity to express themselves during pregnancy.”