Actor Margaret Qualley opened up about the consequences of repeatedly applying facial prosthetic pieces to prepare for scenes in the body horror thriller The Substance.
The film, written and directed by Coralie Fargeat, follows aerobics star Elisabeth Sparkle (Demi Moore) who has aged out of the business and subsequently takes the titular black market serum that generates a younger version of herself named Sue (Qualley) and experiences a career revitalization.
However, all good things come at a hefty price, and the movie leads to the talked-about gory film finale that makes the prom scene in Carrie look like a water balloon fight.
Underneath all the blood and gore, The Substance essentially conveys themes of toxic female beauty standards in Hollywood, explores the destructive nature of rivalry among women, and highlights the struggle for identity and self-worth.
At the insistence of Fargeat, who resisted using CGI, the film mostly relied on practical effects, which meant the actors had to don silicone prosthetics glued directly to different parts of their bodies, including their faces.
Moore, who won the Golden Globe for Best Actress in a Musical or Comedy as the star of the film, revealed it took almost ten hours to transform her face and body as "Gollum" for some of the graphic scenes and roughly two hours to remove up to 14 pieces of prosthetics from her face alone.
Now, Qualley shared the damage her skin suffered from the process of prepping for the climactic scenes for The Substance.
On the latest Happy Sad Confused podcast, the 30-year-old daughter of actor Andie MacDowell told Josh Horowitz that her face had to be cropped out of certain scenes by the end of filming due to developing "bad acne from the prosthetics," the result of which took "a year to recover, physically."
You can watch a clip from the podcast interview here.
Warning: NSFW language.
- YouTubeyoutu.be
Laughing about it in retrospect, Qualley recalled:
"When they’re shooting up my skirt in the beginning credits when it’s like the palm trees all around, and they have all these long lenses from the bottom, that’s just because my face was so f'ked up by that time that they couldn’t shoot my face anymore."
Despite the unappealing skin reaction, Qualley said it worked for one of the four characters she played in her next film, Yorgos Lanthimos’s Kinds of Kindness.
"You know the character that has all the acne?" she asked Horowitz, and continued, "Like, that was just my acne from the prosthetics. And I was, like, 'Oh, this is actually kinda perfect.' "
Her anecdote left social media users wincing.
Qualley posted a behind-the-scenes photo of herself on the set of The Substance showing her character transformation as "Monstro Elisasue" for the movie's bloody climax.
Warning: Graphic
Fans didn't recommend those with weak stomachs see The Substance.
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Others raved.
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In a separate interview with USA Today, Qualley said the makeup process for The Substance was "torture."
She continued:
"I had this awesome team of prosthetic artists that put it on me and took it off of me and got me through the day and made me laugh a couple of times while I was just on the brink of panic.”
It took about six hours for Qualley's transformation as Monstro, which involved wearing a body suit in addition to applying the facial prosthetics to film the Monstro scenes, which took eight days.
“I only have one eye. I can't hear anything. I can't move my arms," she explained of the physical limitations resulting from her suit.
"I've got these retainers in that are like too huge, they just kind of cut everything."
“It was grueling to embody. But the purity of the soul at that moment was so refreshing because I'd been playing (Sue) for four-and-a-half months by that point, who was really hard to relate to. Like really soulless, man.”
She also told Collider:
"My problem was I had to cry while I had the monster costume on."
"At a certain point, you're just swimming—there's like a layer of tears and snot inside your prosthetics, and they're just trying to reglue it down," she added.
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