By now, you’ll have definitely heard about The Substance — one of the most talked-about movies of the year.
It’s the critically acclaimed body horror thriller starring Demi Moore as an aging Hollywood star who takes a black-market drug called the Substance, which spawns a younger, “better” version of herself called Sue, played by Margaret Qualley.
The Substance cleverly examines themes of toxic beauty standards, and even if you’ve not seen it yet, you’ll probably have heard that there are a ton of very graphic scenes involving blood, nudity, and body disfigurement.
Impressively, the film relies primarily on practical effects rather than CGI. However, this did mean that both Demi and Margaret spent a lot of time in the makeup chair while shooting was underway.
Around the time of the film’s release in September, Demi told Entertainment Weekly about the grueling process, revealing some shoot days began with over 9 hours of prosthetics work — with up to 14 pieces “glued” to just her face alone.
And now, Margaret has opened up about her prosthetics experience and the long-term impact it had on her skin.
Speaking to Josh Horowitz on the latest episode of his Happy Sad Confused podcast, Margaret revealed that her face had to be cropped out of certain shots that were filmed towards the end of the shoot because, by that time, she’d developed such bad “acne from the prosthetics.”
Noting that it took “a year to recover, physically,” Margaret said her skin problems lingered while she was shooting her next movie, Yorgos Lanthimos’s Kinds of Kindness. But because she was playing four different characters in the film, she said the acne was “kind of perfect.”
