Inside Out(24)
This was very much on my mind when my new agent, Paula Wagner at CAA, told me I had landed an audition for a romantic comedy called About Last Night. We were still shooting One Crazy Summer; I had a head full of beachy braids when I went in to read for Debbie, the lead, and I had to explain to the director, Ed Zwick, that it wasn’t my usual look. He hadn’t yet cast the male lead, but Ed said he liked me for the part of Debbie, and we had a very good meeting. I was nervous but excited about the prospect of my first major role in a big movie.
The casting process seemed to move at a snail’s pace, and I grew anxious waiting, especially after I learned that he’d hired my old pal Rob Lowe. It seemed like it made more sense to cast me now than ever. But a full month went by. Finally, Ed Zwick called. When I went in to see him at his office in L.A., my worst nightmare came true: he sat down and said, “You are really who I would like to do this film, but you would have to promise me that you would lose weight.” I’ll never forget that moment as long as I live. I felt a combination of sick, pit-of-my-stomach mortification and raw panic. And so began my process of trying to dominate and control my body—and of equating my worth to my weight, my size, my exterior.
In fairness to Ed, I was not leading-lady thin. I’m not tall, and I have a delicate frame, and I had gained weight—whether it was fifteen pounds or twenty, on me, it was a lot. If I’d had better self-esteem, it easily could have been different; I could have simply said, “You know what? You’re right: I gained a little bit of weight, and I can lose that.” And on the outside, of course, that’s exactly how I handled it. I said, “I absolutely see it; I’ll do whatever it takes because I’m totally committed to doing the film.” (And I was totally committed: I knew what it meant to have a big part in a studio film, one I rightly believed could be a hit.) But I did not approach the issue in a rational, healthy way. I was thrown into a tailspin of terror and self-loathing.
I was sober, sure, but all my anxieties just shifted over to food. If I got on a scale, it could ruin my entire day. I have journals upon journals from that period, full of writing about my pain and torture over my body. I’d wake up in the middle of the night and binge-eat and then be covered in crumbs in the morning. I even put a lock on my refrigerator door at one point. It was like food had become a weapon to use in a war against my body, the enemy. I used food as a kind of punishment for everything I believed was wrong and dirty about myself: I imbued it with every bad feeling, all my shame, and then gobbled it up.
With drugs or alcohol or cigarettes, it’s a basic yes or no—either you use them, or you don’t. Yes or no is straightforward. I’m not saying quitting is easy, but in my experience, once the negotiation is off the table, it’s just a no, and then you can deal with the feelings that arise from it. Once I wrapped my head around the idea that partying simply wasn’t an option for me, then it was a different ball game. But with food, you can’t do that. You have to eat. I remember somebody saying, it’s like having a lion that you have to take out for a walk three times a day.
For years, I couldn’t figure out how to eat. It didn’t help that because of my kidney disease, there was damage to my intestines and problems with my metabolism from having taken high levels of steroids as a kid. They saved my life, but they also wreaked total havoc on my digestive system. But the problem wasn’t just physiological: as I have since come to realize, I had never learned how to digest emotionally. I’d never learned how to take something like disappointment or rejection and really break it down, metabolize it, digest it.
If One Crazy Summer put my body on display in a bathing suit, About Last Night upped the ante. Based on the David Mamet play Sexual Perversity in Chicago, About Last Night was, for its time, a daring movie: my character, Debbie, and Rob’s character, Danny, meet at a singles’ bar and have what they think will be a one-night stand; the next morning, Debbie basically flees. Remember: this was way before Sex and the City. The idea that a woman would just want to get laid and then bail without trying to start a relationship was radical. There were a lot of sex scenes, which meant I had to spend a great deal of time naked in front of a room full of men: camera operators, producers, sound guys, and the director who’d told me I was too fat to be in a film.
It’s telling that when Rob and Ed reminisced about the film—which became a huge hit—many years later for the release of the DVD, Rob remembered the two of us being close to hypothermia in a scene shot outdoors in freezing weather and, in another scene, the pain he was in when his leg gave out while he was carrying me. For my part, I just remember the agony I was in displaying my body for the world to see.
Fortunately, the cast was very friendly and supportive, and we all got along well. I’d never worked before with Jim Belushi or with Elizabeth Perkins, who was making her movie debut, but there was a wonderful camaraderie on the set. Rob and I were old friends, and he and Emilio were also close, having grown up together in Malibu, so there were definite boundaries in the sex scenes I had with Rob that made them easier to shoot. But the self-consciousness I felt about my body was almost paralyzing.
About Last Night was released on July 2, 1986, and pulled in over $38 million. It got decent reviews for the most part, and so did I. Roger Ebert wrote in the Chicago Sun-Times: “Moore is especially impressive. There isn’t a romantic note she isn’t required to play in this movie, and she plays them all flawlessly.” No critics remarked on my horrible body, which should have proven to me that my horrible body was all in my head.