When Demi Moore appeared in 2003’s hit Charlie’s Angels: Full Throttle, a lot was made of a scene that saw the actress, then 40, wearing a red two-piece — but not much else, she felt.

In a chat with Michelle Yeoh in Interview magazine, Moore expressed, “There was a lot of conversation around this scene in a bikini, and it was all very heightened, a lot of talk about how I looked. And then I found that there didn’t seem to be a place for me [in Hollywood].”

“I didn’t feel like I didn’t belong. It’s more like I felt that feeling of, I’m not 20, I’m not 30, but I wasn’t yet what they perceived as a mother,” said Moore, now 61.

She added of her career, “It was a time that felt, not dead, but flat.”

For her part, Yeoh, who is 62, replied, “Hollywood is cruel to women of that age, where you don’t find the … the characters that resonate with you anymore. It’s either, you are the mother or you’re old enough not to be sexy in their eyes.”

She added, “It’s like, why can’t a 45-year-old, a 50-year-old, or 60-year-old, be sexy? But that whole perception is undergoing a lot of change because people like you and me won’t sit back and just take it.”

This is central to Moore’s new horror movie, The Substance: She plays an aging star who goes to extremes to recapture her youth.

“That at its core is the addiction,” she says. “For Elisabeth, the drug of experiencing being loved, adored, accepted, wanted — stopping that would have equated to a death, because her value to herself as she was had bottomed out.”

The Substance hits theaters Sept. 20.

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