Demi Moore revealed that she thinks Tom Cruise “was quite embarrassed” by her pregnancy during the pre-production of A Few Good Men.
Speaking to Jia Tolentino at the New Yorker Festival on Saturday, the 61-year-old actress said she was eight months pregnant when she and Cruise, 63, began reading lines for the 1992 film.
“I think Tom [Cruise] was quite embarrassed,” Moore said during the talk, according to People. “I actually felt okay about it. I was moving around, though, right? But I could tell he felt that it was a bit awkward,” she added.
Cruise’s representatives did not immediately respond to request for comment.
Before filming began on the Oscar-nominated film starring Moore, Cruise, and Clint Eastwood, 95, the actress revealed she had started working out while pregnant with her second child, Scout LaRue Willis.
“I look back at that time now, and I go, ‘What the f— was I thinking?’ And what was I even trying to prove? But it wasn’t as supported as it is today,” the actress said, adding that Cruise’s reaction to her pregnancy on set, as well as the pressure she put on herself, reflected the fact that young actresses were not as “supported” then as they are currently.
In 1996, the same decade Moore worked with Cruise, soap opera actress Hunter Tylo filed a lawsuit in Los Angeles Superior Court against her employer, the Spelling Entertainment Group, for pregnancy discrimination. A judge ruled that the company must pay Tylo $4.9 million, plus $1 million in attorneys’ fees.
“It’s one of the many things, for me, that I just felt didn’t make sense. And so I challenged that to say, you know, ‘Why not? Why can’t you have both?’” Moore said about balancing motherhood and a career in the 1990s, when there was industry pressure to choose one or the other.
“I did a two-and-a-half-hour hike the day my water broke. I did a 24-mile bike ride, and then was dancing at a reggae club,” The Substance actress recalled about her pregnancy with Scout, 34, adding that it is no surprise her second daughter came two and a half weeks early.
Moore shares Scout with her ex-husband, Bruce Willis, 70. They also have two other daughters, Rumer, 37, and Tallulah, 31.
During her second pregnancy, Moore appeared naked and heavily pregnant on the controversial August 1991 cover of Vanity Fair. “Pregnancy agrees with me,” she said at the time.
A Few Good Men, in which Moore starred as Lieutenant Commander JoAnne Galloway, a Navy lawyer who is the superior to Tom Cruise’s character, grossed $141.3 million worldwide.
Moore was nominated for Best Actress at the 2025 Oscars for her role in The Substance, in which she portrayed an aging celebrity who uses a black-market drug to make herself look younger after being fired.
“The thing that’s moved me the most is, obviously, I knew women of my age would absolutely relate and connect, but it’s the young people that have come up who have seen themselves in this that has moved me the most,” the actress said about her most recent role.
