Margaret Qualley says her skin was damaged for a full year after The Substance prosthetics

Margaret Qualley has opened up about how damaged her skin got whilst filming The Substance, and has now revealed that the extreme prosthetics she had to wear to portray the body horror of Sue affected her skin so badly she had to endure a year long recovery to get it back to normal.

If you’ve seen The Substance (and if you haven’t, what are you doing here? Sort your life out!) you’ll understand why. As Sue, Margaret Qualley gets put through the ringer with her prosthetics and she says her skin got so bad whilst filming the acclaimed body horror movie that the recovery process was long – and it even affected filming.

Speaking in a recent appearance on the Happy Sad Confused podcast, Margaret Qualley opened up about how The Substance prosthetics affected her. “They had to shoot up my skirt in the beginning credits, with palm trees all around and long lenses from the bottom, because my face was so damaged they couldn’t shoot it anymore,” with director Coralie Fargeat having to use clever camera tricks to continue shooting the movie as Qualley suffered.

Her next picture was Kinds of Kindness, directed by Yorgos Lanthimos. The anthology film had Qualley in four roles and one had severe acne. “The character with a lot of acne?” Qualley said, “That was just acne from the prosthetics.” “I thought, ‘This is just right.’ “I’m playing different characters, and for one of them, I’ll use my crazy prosthetic acne.” In the movie, she plays four characters: Vivian, Martha, Rebecca, and Ruth.

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Margaret Qualley had previously spoken about how prosthetics were used for her breasts in The Substance. Speaking to The Sunday Times, Margaret Qualley explained what Coralie Fargeat’s vision for Sue was in The Substance, saying her “vision of Sue was ’80s inspired, with butt and boobs, think Jessica Rabbit. Unfortunately there is no magic boob potion, so we had to glue those on,” the actress told the outlet. “Coralie found an incredible prosthetic team to endow me with the rack of a lifetime, just not my lifetime.”

Demi Moore and Margaret Qualley discussed what it was like to be in such heavy makeup and prosthetics, saying “I was in there, with [Demi’s] face plastered onto my own body.” Demi Moore then said “I don’t think we could have fit both of us in the suit.” Qualley then insisted, “I wish you were in there with me!”

“I was alone in that thing. I was running into things. It was a torture chamber. The amount of videos I have of me like, ‘I can’t do this anymore.’ It was eight days. I know that doesn’t seem like a lot. We would just go until I had a panic attack. And the tempting thing is you want to peel it off, but of course you can’t do that, because you’ll bring your skin with you.”

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