The Substance’s Margaret Qualley Says Movie ‘F—ed Up’ Her Face

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While has garnered high praise for her performance in 2024’s, she has revealed that the extensive amount of prosthetics that were required for the film took a toll on her skin. Since the project was conceptualized as a body horror movie, Qualley was placed in several layers of makeup for multiple sequences. In a recent discussion, Qualley revealed that this process ended up causing damage to her face.

Margaret Qualley has stated that working on The Substance was a very challenging experience for her in part due to the prosthetics that were applied to her.

During her recent appearance on Josh Horowitz’s Happy Sad Confused podcast, Qualley disclosed, “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.” She then added, “It took me probably, like, a year to recover physically from all of it.”

The effects of The Substance followed Margaret Qualley to her next movie, Kinds of Kindness. However, the problems she had with her skin ended up being useful for her in this film due to the variety of characters she had to play. “And I was like, ‘Oh, this is actually kinda perfect. Like, I’m playing all these different characters,” she noted. “For one of them, we’ll really use all my crazy prosthetic acne,” she stated.

Demi Moore has also echoed Margaret Qualley’s sentiments regarding the physical toll that the shooting for The Substance took on them both. The Hollywood Reporter revealed that it regularly took as much as six hours for Moore to transform into her character.