Margaret Qualley’s Substance Transformation Messed Up Her Face

Filming The Substance was “at once rewarding and painful” for Margaret Qualley. The actor opened up about the body horror film during the Jan. 13 episode of the Happy Sad Confused podcast, and she revealed that her character’s grotesque transformation affected her physically, too. It was a “super intense” five-month shoot — and the effects stuck with her.

A Surprise Side Effect

In the film, Qualley plays an overnight sensation named Sue, who is created when fading Hollywood icon Elisabeth Sparkle (Demi Moore) tries to preserve her youth by taking a special serum. Over the course of the film, strange things begin happening to the two women’s bodies. Their characters undergo shocking transformations, which required both Qualley and Moore to wear numerous prosthetics on their faces and bodies.

Unfortunately for Qualley, her skin didn’t react well to them. She said she developed “crazy prosthetic acne,” and it lasted long beyond The Substance’s five-month shoot in early 2022. “It took me probably like a year to recover, like, physically, from all of it,” Qualley said on the podcast.

Her breakouts even influenced how they filmed her toward the end of production. Recalling an upward shot of her used in the beginning credits, she said, “That’s just because my face was so f*cked up by that time that they couldn’t, like, shoot my face anymore.”

The acne even carried over to her next project, Kind of Kindness, which she filmed later in 2022. Noting that one of her characters shared her skin condition, she said, “That was just my acne from the prosthetics.”

The Prosthetic Process

Special makeup effects designer Pierre Olivier Persin was behind the prosthetics in The Substance, and he told InSession Film in December that Qualley had to have prosthetics glued to her face, plus wear a suit with still more prosthetics attached. Even with a cooling vest on, it was very hot for her.

“There was a heat wave in Paris at that time, and people were passing out literally on set, some because of the heat,” he said. “So, we had to take a break and stop the shooting while people were recovering. It was quite tough.”

Qualley recently recalled to Vogue Australia how much she disliked having to have it all applied. Her days on set sometimes involved six hours having her makeup and prosthetics put on and another two having them removed.

“I would stay up all night dreading the prosthetics,” she told the magazine. “I would have such anxiety about it.”

Ultimately, though, the project was important to Qualley. She recalled on the Happy Sad Confused podcast that she was interested in it as soon as she read the script. “I wanted to see that movie and I wanted to tell that story,” she said.