Margaret Qualley says her Substance prosthetics screwed up her face for a year

There are many moments, in Coralie Fargeat’s 2024 horror-satire The Substance, when Fargeat’s frequently invasive camera is clearly avoiding its characters’ faces on purpose. That’s mostly just part of the movie’s whole ethos, with the camera frequently breaking the human body down into individual components in order to highlight how much sheer objectification is being hurled at its characters on a day-to-day basis. But sometimes, as it turns out, it’s because star Margaret Qualley’s face was just too damaged by the movie’s prosthetics in order to proceed with a more “normal” shot.

This is per an appearance Qualley made on Josh Horowitz’s Happy, Sad, Confused podcast this week, where she revealed that the prosthetics she wore for the film—which ventures deeper and deeper into the world of body horror as it parable continues—irritated her skin so badly that she had massive breakouts that persisted well after filming. “They couldn’t shoot my face anymore,” said Qualley. “At the end, when they’re shooting up my skirt in the beginning credits, and 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 fucked up.”

Qualley notes that movie-goers can actually see the results of all those Monstro Elisasue looks in a different film, noting that one of her multiple characters, Ruth, in Yorgos Lanthimos’ Kinds Of Kindness, is just Qualley sans makeup, with “all the acne from my prosthetics.” (Qualley estimates that it took roughly a year for her face to recover from the damage; at the same time—and despite noting that five months of filming as “Sue” was at least mildly deranging—she speaks warmly about her time on the production with co-star Demi Moore.)

[via Variety]