Margaret Qualley Says Her “Face Was So F***ed Up” Due to ‘The Substance’ Prosthetics

The actress, who plays Sue in the body horror film, recently shared on the Happy Sad Confused podcast that her skin was damaged for nearly a year after filming wrapped.

“Like, at the end, when they’re shooting up my skirt in the beginning credits, when 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 by that time that they couldn’t, like, shoot my face anymore,” Qualley explained to host Josh Horowitz.

The Once Upon a Time in Hollywood actress added that she was still struggling with acne from the prosthetics when she began shooting her next film, Kinds of Kindness.

“So, you know the character that has all that acne? That was just my acne from the prosthetics,” Qualley, who plays characters Vivian, Martha, Ruth and Rebecca in the Yorgos Lanthimos-directed movie, said. “And I was like, ‘Oh this is kind of perfect. I’m playing all these different characters — for one of them we’ll use all my crazy prosthetic acne.’ It took me probably a year to recover physically from all of it.”

Margaret Qualley in ‘The Substance.’ MUBI/Courtesy Everett Collection

The Substance, also starring Demi Moore and Dennis Quaid, follows a fading celebrity who takes a black-market drug: a cell-replicating substance that temporarily creates a younger, better version of herself.

Production designer Pierre Olivier-Persin previously told The Hollywood Reporter that Qualley also sported fake breasts in the movie, which were made by taking a live cast of the actress.

“It’s pretty much the same process for every prosthetic: You start with the live cast or scan, then you sculpt the change you want to obtain, and then you mold those sculptures,” he explained. “Then you use silicon or whatever material you are working with, then you stick them on and paint them.”

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