Demi Moore is opening up about how she changed herself in an attempt to make her marriages work. The 57-year-old actress called into SiriusXM’s The Jess Cagle Show and recounted how she learned to love herself amid and following her marriages.
Moore was married to Freddy Moore from 1980 to 1985, to Bruce Willis from 1987 to 2000, and to Ashton Kutcher from 2005 to 2013.
"I think it's a process of, not to sound cliché, but it's really a process of learning to love yourself, accepting who you are just as you are," she said. "For me, I changed myself so many times over and over to fit what I thought somebody else wanted... We're kind of conditioned to work toward being desired, but we're not supposed to have desires of our own."
Though things didn't work out in her marriages, Moore said that she thinks "working through a relationship, it's really commendable in our disposable time to go through the journey of honoring the love that brought you together in the first place and giving it everything you've got."
"But you can't do that without really [having] that love and acceptance of yourself," she noted.
During the interview, the actress also spoke about her journey to sobriety, something she largely credits to Joel Schumacher, who directed her in the 1985 flick St. Elmos Fire.
"I will forever be so grateful to him, as they say somebody seeing more of you than you see of yourself," she said. "And in a way he was doing it for himself. He wasn't yet sober. So he was doing for me what he couldn't yet do for himself. What a gift."
At the time, Schumacher told Moore that, to keep her role in the movie, she had to go to rehab.
"Work was the only thing that meant anything to me. I didn't have any values. I wasn't enough to have kept myself sober. But doing the film was," she said. "And whatever kind of divine intervention that took place of Joel sticking his neck out for me, along with the producers... being able to start the film sober, playing a drug addict, it gave me the room to start to find myself."
In her memoir, Inside Out, Moore credited her rehab stint with saving her life.
"St. Elmo's will always be the movie that changed my life," she wrote. "If I hadn't gone to rehab to make that film, I really wonder if I'd still be alive."
Watch the video below for more on Moore.
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