Margaret Qualley has revealed that the prosthetics she wore for the award-winning film The Substance left lasting damage on her skin.
The gory body horror film follows Elisabeth (Demi Moore), a fading movie star who is desperate to turn back the clock on her body. She injects herself with the mystery toxin to make herself look younger, but it comes with dark side effects, and she effectively births a youthful version of herself called Sue (Margaret Qualley).
Appearing in the latest episode of the Happy Sad Confused podcast, Qualley revealed that the prosthetics were so damaging to her skin that it impacted her next film, Yorgos Lanthimos’s Kinds of Kindness, in which she played several different characters.
“You know the character that has, like, all the acne, like, that was just my acne from the prosthetics,” she said. “And I was like, ‘Oh, this is actually kinda perfect. Like, I’m playing all these different characters. For one of them, we’ll really use all my crazy prosthetic acne.’”
“It took me probably, like, a year to recover physically from all of it. When they’re shooting up my skirt at the end, or in the beginning credits, when it’s, like, the palm trees all around, and they have, like, all these long lenses from the bottom. That’s just because my face was so f***ed up by that time that they couldn’t, like, shoot my face anymore.”
Moore has previously spoken about undergoing hours of prosthetic work each day during filming.
“It was always an hour and a half to get off. Two hours, roughly,” she said of her routine while they shot the film in Paris in 2022.
She continued: “It’s glued. You have to be as careful if not more careful taking it off so you don’t destroy your skin.”
The film proved to be a huge hit: Moore won the Golden Globes for the Best Performance by an Actress in a Motion Picture – Musical or Comedy for her role in the movie, which is also predicted for Oscars success.
Moore, whose credits include Ghost, Indecent Proposal and A Few Good Men, was visibly surprised after taking home the Golden Globe trophy, and called it “the first thing” she has ever won during her 45-year career in the acting industry.
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Speaking about the film withThe Independent, Moore said her part in the moviewas far from a ‘glamour role”.
“I knew going in that I had to be vulnerable and raw,” she said, as Qualley added: “We kind of held each other’s hands as we walked through the fire.”