Margaret Qualley Says ‘The Substance’ ‘Fucked Up’ Her Face

"It took me probably, like, a year to recover physically from all of it," she told a podcast about the prosthetics used in the film.

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Margaret Qualley Says ‘The Substance’ ‘Fucked Up’ Her Face

Demi Moore and Margaret Qualley‘s award-winning movie, The Substance, is a wild and hilarious but brutal film about the pressure society places on women to look young and the lengths women are willing to go to maintain a youthful ~glow~. Moore and Qualley’s characters in the film get pretty fucked up and, for Qualley, at least, the body horror didn’t stop when filming ended.

“It took me probably, like, a year to recover physically from all of it,” Qualley told the Happy Sad Confused podcast about the prosthetics used in the film. “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 fucked up by that time that they couldn’t, like, shoot my face anymore.”

Qualley said it was ultimately fine though, because her bad skin became a part of one of her characters on her next project, Kinds of Kindness. “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.'”

In September, Moore similarly told Entertainment Weekly that the prosthetic process was grueling. She said she was in a chair for more than nine hours every day getting the prosthetics applied and then having them removed. “It was always an hour and a half to get off. Two hours, roughly,” she said. “It’s glued. You have to be as careful if not more careful taking it off so you don’t destroy your skin.”


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