Demi Moore opens up over Striptease payday drama

Demi Moore has opened up over the drama that engulfed her Striptease movie pay packet.

The actor was paid $12.5 million to make the 1996 movie, making her the highest-paid actress in Hollywood at that time, and drawing ire after the movie was critically savaged.

Now 61, Demi believes the backlash came about solely because of the film's themes of female sexual empowerment.

"When I became the highest-paid actress - why is it that, at that moment, the choice was to bring me down?" she asked, in a new interview with The New York Times' The Interview podcast.

"I think anyone who had been in the position that was the first to get that kind of equality of pay would probably have taken a hit. But because I did a film that was dealing with the world of stripping and the body, I was extremely shamed."

She added she felt there were similar issues at play in 1991, when she was criticised for posing unclothed for the cover of Vanity Fair while heavily pregnant.

"It's no different than when I did the cover for Vanity Fair pregnant," Demi said. "I didn't understand why it was such a big deal, why women when they were pregnant needed to be hidden? Why is it that we have to deny that we had sex? That's the fear, right, that if you show your belly, that means, oh, my gosh, you've had sex."