Demi Moore’s ‘Popcorn Actress’ Golden Globes Speech Was the Most Moving of the Night

If you’re only going to listen to one Golden Globes 2025 acceptance speech (and we get it, they can run long), make it Demi Moore’s. After winning for The Substance, the actor reminded everyone that this is the first acting award she’s won in her 45-year career, while sharing a deeply personal story about being made to feel small even when she was successful.

“Thirty years ago, I had a producer tell me that I was a ‘popcorn actress,’” Moore said. “And at that time, I made that mean that this wasn’t something that I was allowed to have. That could do movies that were successful that made a lot of money, but that I couldn’t be acknowledged. And I bought in and I believed that. And 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’ve done what I was supposed to do.”

Moore explained that it was at that low point that she got the script for The Substance, and decided that maybe she wasn’t done with acting after all. She went on to thank her costar, Margaret Qualley, and everyone who believed in her when she didn’t believe in herself, but she saved the most poignant part of her acceptance speech for the end.

“In those moments when we don’t think we’re smart enough or pretty enough or skinny enough or successful enough or basically just not enough,” Moore said, “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.’ And so today, I celebrate this as a marker of my wholeness and of the love that is driving me and for the gift of doing something I love and being reminded that I do belong.”