Demi Moore Reveals Tom Cruise's Awkward Reaction When She Announced Her Pregnancy

Demi Moore told a story at The New Yorker Festival that made me wince and nod at the same time: back when she was gearing up for A Few Good Men, she was very pregnant, very visible, and got an awkward reaction from Tom Cruise.

The moment she remembers

At a Q&A on October 25, the 62-year-old Moore said she was eight months pregnant when she started reading lines for A Few Good Men. She was meeting with director Rob Reiner and co-star Tom Cruise, and when Cruise realized she was expecting, she felt he got embarrassed. Moore says she was fine with it, but she could tell he wasn’t. She even joked that she was moving around a lot — you know, visibly, third-trimester stuff — and the vibe was just awkward.

For context, this was while she was in the home stretch with her second child, Scout Willis. And at the time, the industry had a pretty rigid idea about what a working actress and a new mom could or could not be doing, often at the same time.

What it meant then, and how she sees it now

Moore pushed against the old thinking. She didn’t buy the idea that motherhood and a serious acting career were mutually exclusive, and she admits she put a lot of pressure on herself to prove that point. She also called out how different it looks now — actresses today, she said, get a lot more support making those choices than they did back then.

'Why not? Why can't you have both?'

She’s also honest about the toll that mindset took. Looking back, she says she wonders what the f--- she was thinking and what exactly she was trying to prove. The takeaway here isn’t a takedown of Cruise so much as a snapshot of how the business used to treat pregnancy — and how that pressure landed on the women carrying it.