Screenwriter Aaron Sorkin once said in an interview that a studio executive on the film asked why Moore’s character was a woman if the movie had no sex scene
Demi Moore is recalling how Aaron Sorkin stood up for her on the set of their 1992 hit, A Few Good Men.
During an interview with the Los Angeles Times with her The Substance costar, Margaret Qualley, and director, Coralie Fargeat, Moore, 61, noted that when she made A Few Good Men with Sorkin, 63, and Tom Cruise, a studio executive requested that her and Cruise’s characters sleep together.
“Well, then why did we hire Demi Moore?” the actress recalled the unnamed executive saying when Sorkin — who wrote the screenplay — denied that request.
“I think that it’s how they were conditioned,” Moore told the L.A. Times of the incident. “It was a part of the accepted conditioning — that of course that’s why they would have someone like me there.”
In A Few Good Men, Moore plays Joanne Gallaway, an attorney in the U.S. Navy who teams up with Cruise’s Daniel Kaffee to defend two service members accused of murdering a U.S. Marine. The movie follows the pair as they take on a seemingly impossible case and expose corruption on the part of a villainous colonel (Jack Nicholson).
The movie, which Sorkin adapted from his own original Broadway play of the same name, also starred Kevin Bacon, Kiefer Sutherland and Kevin Pollak.
“We’ve actually come an enormous distance,” Moore, who plays an actress on the wrong end of sexist attitudes from executives in her new movie, added. “It doesn’t make it okay, but we can’t hit a hammer over it. We have to move [forward]. It really starts with us.”
From Left: Tom Cruise and Demi Moore in 1992’s ‘A Few Good Men’. Sidney Baldwin/Columbia/Kobal/Shutterstock
Sorkin previously spoke to the same incident during a 2011 writer’s roundtable discussion with The Hollywood Reporter.
“There was an executive on the movie who gave me a note: ‘If Tom Cruise and Demi Moore aren’t going to sleep with each other, why is Demi Moore a woman?’ ” the filmmaker said at the time. “I said the obvious answer: women have purposes other than to sleep with Tom Cruise.”