But the meatier issue is how her age now affects her career. Asked how she likes the indie circuit after spending so many years as a star in big-budget studio movies, she analyzes the question with surprising self-awareness. “The frustrating part is that the type of roles I’d be interested in are not really coming to me,” says Moore, who fidgets and balls herself into various contortions like a kid but speaks in her signature hoarse whisper. “I hate to say it’s a function of my age—but yes, I think in some ways it is. The majority of [female] roles are geared between 25 and 35.”
A dearth of star vehicles, though, clearly hasn’t hurt Moore’s fame, which throughout her career has been stoked less by reviews of her screen work than by chatter about such happenings as her two nude Vanity Fair covers—one taken in 1991 while she was seven months pregnant—and her marriages to fellow stars Willis and Kutcher, who was a barely pubescent 12 years old when Ghost debuted. (He’s now 31.)
In fact, critical kudos have never been Moore’s calling card—and she has never needed them. (She did receive a Golden Globe nomination for 1990’s Ghost despite the film’s tepid reviews; its most notable accomplishment was half a billion dollars in box office returns.) A surprising number of Moore’s movies continue to loom large in America’s collective memory—and on the Blockbuster shelf, a Darwinian environment that ruthlessly weeds out anything the public no longer cares to take home. Throughout the Nineties, Moore embodied a sort of heroic femininity—rare beauty, great ambition and enough brains—that mirrored a pre-9/11, prerecession confidence in American exceptionalism. Her Hollywood ascendancy gained momentum from A Few Good Men and Indecent Proposal and steamrolled over such career speed bumps as The Scarlet Letter, in which she took a thespian turn that earned her much critical disdain. In 1996 she became the highest-paid actress to date with her $12 million paycheck for the unloved Striptease. Then, at the height of her prowess, Moore produced and starred in Ridley Scott’s G.I. Jane, a film that put forward the then radical notion that women should have the right to serve in active combat. Or at least women as buff as Moore. For the part, Moore shaved her head and mastered a one-armed push-up; during a brutal fight scene with Viggo Mortensen, she growled the jaw-dropping line “Suck my dick!” The movie, as she puts it, “got slammed.”
“I think G.I. Jane got hit because I was paid $12 million to do Striptease,” says Moore. “In a sense, Striptease was a film where women felt I betrayed them. G.I. Jane is a film where men felt I betrayed them. The focus went on that paycheck.”
