Interview: Chrissy Iley meets Demi Moore (original) (raw)

I am waiting for Demi Moore in the lounge bar of the Gramercy Park Hotel. It's velvety and dark. When she enters the room, she takes it. It crackles with her arrival. She is alone, no entourage, no assistant, no publicist. Walking slightly oddly, taking tiny steps with her legs a little too close together. She sinks to the velvet beside me. 'Look. I bent over and popped a button on my skirt.' It's a denim pencil skirt. She had to walk with a hobble because the lost button had left her skirt open too wide and too high. She asks our waitress for a half-caff latte - and a sewing kit.

She is wearing a pretty chiffony blue and white blouse, her hair long and lustrous, her eyes small but glittering. She has a presence, but it's not necessarily the one you'd expect, not haughty or demanding. There's a sweetness to her embarrassment of walking into a room with a broken skirt, not knowing who in that room was me.

She is instantly open, touchable. 'I am in New York because my husband is shooting a movie here.' She uses the term 'my husband' a lot and shows you a soft glow as she says it. Ashton Kutcher and Demi Moore made big news when they got together, because of the 15-year age gap. I tell her I've met him a couple of times and found him very knowing, very sweet. 'I agree with you on that. It's a hard thing for me to describe exactly how he is. Who he is on a soul level has definitely lived beyond his 29 years. There's so much more that he just gets - even if he hasn't had the physical experience, he seems to have a knowing.' She smiles beatifically.

Demi Moore is softer, nicer than you'd imagine. You sense that she too has had a few lifetimes, a harsh upbringing, never in one place for long, with alcoholic parents and a stepfather who committed suicide when she was 17. Plagued by illness throughout her childhood, driven into an imaginary world, a drive of super force that got her to Blame it on Rio. Engaged to Emilio Estevez in the Brat-Pack heat of the mid-Eighties, broke it off to become half of perhaps the decade's most famous couple with Bruce Willis. In 1996 she gave up on Hollywood to move to Idaho to bring up her three daughters, Rumer, Scout and Tallulah now 18, 15 and 13. Then the marriage broke down - but Demi did not.

Her screen persona always has something indestructible about it. There's a toughness, a strength, a determination. Even when she was the object being traded in Indecent Proposal (Robert Redford's character wanted to buy her) she was never a victim. She has done plenty of blockbusters - St Elmo's Fire, Ghost, A Few Good Men - and in 1996 became the highest-paid actress in Hollywood, getting $12.5m for Striptease. In the same year she did GI Jane: shaved head and one-handed press-ups in the mud.

The inescapable thing that she gives us is steel. What does she think of this perception of her? 'Do you know what, I think obviously there must be some strength, because this is the response from more than a handful of people. It's not something I'm conscious of. But I think it's there. It's part of some of the tough and challenging experiences I've had in my life. That I've overcome them has created a sort of strength. But I never get the idea that I come over like a warrior. In a funny way I understand it, and it's also just so opposite of where I see myself and how I feel myself.'

She looks right at you as she talks and she's not afraid to be looked right at, herself. Her character in the upcoming Mr Brooks - 'a very twisted tale' - is the detective hunting down a serial killer played by Kevin Costner, who is all the more spooky because of his friendly, upstanding, neighbourly qualities. She loves the juxtaposition of kindly Costner's regular-guy image and his being a murderous, unhinged, calculating killer. Her character was in the throes of a divorce and was being manipulated by her husband for money because she comes from a privileged background. 'So there were those aspects of this particular character that were very different to my life. Because she came from privilege, she behaved differently. She had a rage that terrified me. She is someone who is out of control, allowing their emotions to run the show. I have never been that - it is probably my biggest fear,' she says, laughing her smoky, crackling laugh. 'She came from a safe place, so she could go into those rages. Maybe some part of the privilege that she came from was a cushion that allowed that.'

Interesting that in her soap-opera-bad childhood, filled as it was with betrayal, loss, despair, disappointment, she felt she must contain her emotions. 'There was one element in the story that got lost. It was an interesting character detail. She liked to pay for sex, which for me was fascinating. It was never really thought of as a woman's choice, so it was twisted in that juicy kind of way.' The irony is not lost on Demi that this is the reverse plot of Indecent Proposal. She seems excited about how twisted this movie and her character is in the way that only someone whose life is far from that can.

Demi Moore's first Hollywood 'comeback' was in a bikini in Charlie's Angels: Full Throttle. Even more impressive was her role in Estevez's Bobby as alcoholic nightclub singer Virginia Fallon - which, it has been said, was based on her mother, also called Virginia, who was a drunk, but not a singer. 'He did know my mother. I'm not sure if it was specifically her, but I think there were interesting elements. When he first sent me the script it was to look at it, to see what I thought of it, it wasn't necessarily to be in it.'

At that time Moore was in Idaho and didn't know this was to be part of her way out of there. The fact that Emilio had decided to call a fading singer Virginia gave it an extra piquancy. 'The irony wasn't lost on me,' she says drily. 'It was a gift. Whatever parallels there were with me and my mother, it was a really positive way for me to get more inside the pain that she was going through.' And the pain that you were going through. Your upbringing was hard. 'It had some not-so-great moments. But there are people who have had it worse and people who have had it not so bad. The one thing I can say is: through all the nuttiness I was loved by my mum and my father.'

Her mother was only 19 when she had her. She didn't grow up with her biological father. He left her mother before she was born. Until she was 15, Demi, named Demetria after a shampoo that her mother saw in a magazine, believed Danny Guynes was her father when in fact it was Charles Harman, a cocaine-addicted vending-machine salesman from Texas. Was she hurt not to have been told? Confused that the man she thought was her father for 15 years turned out not to be? 'Yes and no. It was the norm of a certain kind. It was what I knew. Certainly not what I would want for my children, but if I didn't step out of how hurtful that was, it would have been mind-twisting for me. There were many insecurities and doubts, but I know they made the best choices they could. They thought they were doing the right thing.'

She and her brother Morgan were constantly relocated. Guynes's job as a salesman meant they moved 30 times before she was 15, and she was never in the same school for a year. She learnt to assimilate fast, to not make friends because she was going to lose them. At 12, she had an operation to correct a lazy eye. Then she got a kidney disease called nephrosis. The drugs caused her body fluids to build up so much she couldn't stand. The disease can be fatal.

When Danny Guynes committed suicide, her mother spiralled into worse alcoholism. Moore became the parent. 'You could either be trapped by what was going on around you, or you could find a way out. I think that everything, even if it is scary or good, comes into our life to help elevate and expand us as human beings. When I played Virginia Fallon it was touching a dark place that maybe I didn't get to go to when my mother was alive - my own compassion for the pain she lived with... There was a lot of ugliness to the character of Virginia, and I felt sad for that. You don't come into this life wanting to be anything other than happy.'

It's as if whatever unhappiness she suffered as a child she wants to touch, understand as an actor, but never live through. She always wants to make the choice to be happy. Sounds simple and extremely complicated. What she doesn't want to carry with her is bitterness. 'If I look back at my past, I look at those things as my gifts. Some of my lowest points were the most exciting opportunities to push through to be a better person.' Do you mean growing up? 'No, not even growing up. I think we all want the same things. We all want to feel loved, and feel a part of something, but we all have self-doubt no matter where we came from.' Did the extremities of your upbringing push you further away from self-doubt? 'We weren't dirt poor, but we didn't have a lot of money. I entered this career having no background or connection to acting. I had so little I had nothing to lose and everything to gain by taking the risk.'

She was inspired to try acting by Nastassja Kinski, who was a neighbour. She had little experience but a pile of determination. She married a singer called Freddy Moore in 1980 and divorced him a few years later, but kept his name.

'Once you've tasted a bit of success, it's more challenging. We have to continue to be willing to take a risk so that we don't get too safe. Unwillingness to risk failure is always there, but it gets harder when you feel you have more to lose. So the better place to keep yourself in is out of your comfort zone, willing to try even at the risk of failing. And that's not natural to me at all.' She laughs and raises her perfect eyebrows at herself. 'In fact, it's completely unnatural.'

Perhaps this reassessing herself has come through her interest in Kabbalah. Perhaps she has never known what a comfort zone is. Looking over her life, it seems it has been filled with risk: her career, her relationships. What does she think? What were the most exciting risks? 'I don't know,' she says, 'but Striptease was a huge risk for me. It was difficult for me to do the dancing and the stripping. And the gain from it was different to what I would have imagined. While the public perception was hyper-focused on what I was being paid for taking my clothes off, for me it was the intense focus of connecting with my body and myself in a sensual, sexual way, in a way that I've never felt before. I was always very uncomfortable with my body. And it was to do with being female and seductive.'

It's hard to believe Demi could have been uncomfortable in her perfect body. Her long delicate limbs, all just fleshy enough; her pale flawless skin. 'No, I was not. I've always felt much more self-conscious. If you look at everything I've done before that, there weren't a lot of highly sexual roles.'

Indeed, she was always the vixen or victim, the object not the predator. 'Being on stage in this character and the way in which I had to use my body made me find my sexuality. In the same way that when I did GI Jane it allowed me to find a connection with the masculine part of myself.' The two films came out back-to-back in 1996 and did show a kind of schizophrenia - absolute opposites and extremes that met in Moore. 'It was fascinating. It helped doing Striptease first. I took a lot of criticism, a lot of heat, got hit really hard for both of these films, I think because there was a lot of money attached to it.' Her eyes downcast, she seems embarrassed about the money rather than proud of setting a new standard for female stars. That was your gimme period, I say, as in gimme more. She chuckles, a little slowly, a little uncomfortably, waits to see if I'm going to criticise. Instead I say there's nothing wrong with asking for what you want. Male superstars were certainly being paid at least that. Bruce Willis certainly was. 'Yes, having greater desire, does that make you more selfish, or does that give you more opportunity to give?'

Certainly her demands were not seen as altruistic. The bubble had burst. 'Both these movies combined to give me some big lessons. I feel I betrayed women with Striptease and men with GI Jane. That wasn't my intention, but I feel that's how it was perceived. But yes, in that sense I challenged the comfort zone.' The heat hurt her. Even now she looks sad about this. But, she says brightly, 'Where I am now is probably one of the moments of greatest risks in my career. When I stepped away from working just to be with my children, I never really thought about the ramifications of defecting from my career.'

What was the biggest risk: going to Idaho, abandoning the career, or coming back? 'When I realised I needed to be with my kids in one place for whatever amount of time, it didn't feel like a risk in terms of my career. It was just that my children were important to me. They were little, aged from about five to 11. It wasn't about: am I giving up work? It was about: my children are important to me.'

What made you decide to stop and move permanently to Idaho? 'We announced our separation, and my mother died. I went off to do a film after this called Passion of Mind. The film didn't get the best of me and my children weren't getting the best of me. I was not in the mix. The film had been an extraordinary script and an OK film, but it wasn't about that. I was the product of divorced parents who weren't present for me. I realised if I wasn't present for them I was going to have bigger issues with them later.' She did not want to let history repeat itself. Demi was left alone at a young age and felt she had too much responsibility too quickly and she grew up too fast. 'I didn't want to work and drag my kids with me while they were trying to cross this huge transition. I wanted them to become as stable and as confident as possible. There are people who go through this and don't have the financial means, but I did. It wasn't a risk; it was the right thing to do.'

Her mother was only 54 when she died of cancer. Their relationship had become frustrated, but Moore moved the whole family to a motel in New Mexico so she could be with her in the last weeks. The fairy-tale marriage with Willis was over and she had not left her career on a high note. 'The bigger risk was stepping back into this world that I'd left at a point where I'd faced the harshest criticism I'd ever faced. I wasn't even sure why I wanted to come back. My children, though, kept asking: are you ever going to work again? Maybe they saw that they were missing that piece of me. It was a big part of who I am.' Were you missing it? 'A little bit. I was very happy just being in Idaho. I also realised we can get too comfortable. A sanctuary becomes a hiding place, and that's not a benefit to anybody.'

Her comeback movie was Charlie's Angels. Was that another risk? Appearing in a bikini alongside women a decade younger? 'I didn't worry about being with younger women and I didn't have time to think about being in a bikini. I was asked if I could start working a month earlier than originally planned, so I didn't have time to obsess about that.' But wasn't there a part of your life when you were obsessed with exercise, like running 20 miles a day? 'Long ago, when I did Striptease and GI Jane.' She pauses. 'It wasn't just about the parts requiring it. I was much more driven and obsessive about physical exercise and dieting. It peaked. After GI Jane I was burnt out. I stopped work and I stopped exercising. I realised I needed to come from the inside and find a sense of peace. I realised being thin did not equal happiness.' She found that the happier she was and the less she tried, the better she felt and looked. Although the tabloids would have it another way. Some cite that she paid $3m for her new body.

Does she find that a compliment? 'No. It's irritating. And it isn't true. To fight it feels futile because I feel it perpetuates the myth. But really,' she says with mounting anger, 'the culmination for me was when there were multiple reports I had my knees done. When I read that, I thought: wow, should I have been worried about my knees?' Her knees are readily available beside me. She invites me to examine them for the scar. She bends them and shows me a wrinkle, but not a scar. I put my finger across it to check. I can feel no ridge, just smooth skin. A couple of businessmen in the corner look alarmed as to why I would be stroking Demi Moore's knees. But she seems to find it amusing. 'It's not just my knees. They say I've had multiple face surgeries. I was in getting a facial recently and there were reports that I'd been in there for countless hours, saying I'd had surgical procedures. Am I going to sue? Do I really care?'

She's adamant she has had nothing done to her face. She allows me to stare at her very closely. No evidence of any work. She also assures me she's never had lypo. Here are the insecurities that created the steel. I tell her she has to take it as a compliment that people think that she looks so good.

I wonder if the focus on her looks has made her introspective. At 44, she's too old for the bimbo role but not old enough to be the matriarch. Although in her next film, Flawless, which reunites her with Michael Caine 23 years after they starred in the kitschy sex farce Blame it on Rio, she plays a woman who is 'brittle. A woman who's given up on her personal life. It's set in the Sixties, when a woman striving for a career in the corporate-diamond world was unheard of. It was interesting to explore her. She's strong but not really. She's brittle.'

It's as if playing brittle gets rid of the brittleness in her own life. 'I'd like to do something more vulnerable. But I suppose if I really want it, I'll have to go hunt it down myself. We hear all the complaints. There aren't enough roles for women my age. So I think: let's figure out creative ways to find these. My goal, though, is to find more ways in which I can be a better giver in all aspects. To be a better wife, better mother, better friend, better sister.' Do you feel more able to be loved now? 'Yes, I do. I feel like I have a great gift of being with somebody who loves me and supports me. We share a connection that allows me to dig deeper within myself and look at things that I was afraid to look at.' She says this with certainty - even talking about Kutcher she seems to shiver with strength and softness at the same time.

She met Kutcher when she was in New York doing a photo shoot and he was hosting Saturday Night Live. He was funny and gorgeous, successful and amusing, and he was just about to embark on a successful movie career. A group of friends went out to dinner so it didn't feel awkward, like a set-up. At the time everyone thought she had such a good relationship with her ex-husband Bruce Willis that they were about to get back together again.

Demi and Ashton were married by a Kabbalah rabbi in 2005. Was she looking for someone, or did he take her by surprise? 'I actually think I was at a point where I thought I was never going to find anybody. I don't come with baggage, I come with trunks - and as the mother of three teenagers I wasn't feeling sorry for myself, but dating seems kind of silly.'

Yet she has learnt to deal with those trunks and unpack the bitterness and anger that makes them such a heavy load. We see happy pictures of Moore, her daughters, her ex-husband and her current husband smilingly skiing or on family days out. Kutcher never tried to be a father or replace Willis. The children call him Mod - My Other Dad. What's the formula for getting on so well with her ex? 'People forget that you get brought together with someone because you share a connection, and it gets buried when things go off on another path. It's easy to get attached to the negativity, the bad stuff, the pain. But you do have a choice.'

She's done exceptionally well with her very modern family, who all go on holiday together. Does she think how well the relationship continues depends on how badly it ended? 'No. It takes too much work not to get over it. The energy it takes not to forgive is exhausting. It doesn't mean it's easy. There's lots of emotions and sensitivities to deal with. In our case we placed our children as a priority. After all, each of them was created by a piece of us, and I never wanted them to think what happened to us had any reflection on them. My parents used my brother and me as pawns. I was determined that that would never happen with my family. I have daughters, so obviously I support a daughter's relationship with their father because it could dictate choices they would later make.' She gives a haunted little chuckle. 'I was the parent with my parents. I took it all on.'

So many things have been written about her getting together with Ashton. The fact that she was 15 years older. The fact that she was once one half of a famous celebrity couple - long before there had been Bennifer, Brangelina or TomKat.

'On paper if somebody had said: you are going to be marrying somebody who is 25, as he was then, who sees a woman who has three kids as a bonus, I would have laughed. I would never have known that this man could have existed.' Who he was was evident very early on. That first night that the big group went out to dinner. 'I stepped out of the room to call my children to say goodnight. I was on the phone to them saying I love you and I miss you guys - and there he was. He stood there and he looked right at me and he said: "That is the most beautiful thing I ever heard." He paused, then closed the door. So I knew I had encountered someone really different. I just knew.'

Did you feel that you knew him before in another life? (As he says of her.) 'I felt there was a connection. I feel like I have been with him the whole of my life. That's how it feels. I feel so, so blessed. I wasn't looking for a relationship. I asked the universe for a partner, somebody who I could really share everything with.'

When she talks about Kutcher, her voice is so warm it's almost purring. She could talk about him all the time, really, how great and solid and clever and sexy he is.

Do you want a baby with him? 'We would love that. It would be just fantastic. We are doing lots of practising. And you can't complain about practising with him...' She giggles a sweet girly giggle. 'I don't know what I've done, what merit I've had, that the universe could reward me by putting us together.'

I think you have a genuine happy ending. 'I do, I do.' You feel happy for her. You feel happy such love exists. In fact, mesmerised.

· Mr Brooks is released on 12 October