During a recent appearance on the Happy Sad Confused podcast, Margaret Qualley shared how makeup for ‘The Substance’ affected her.
“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 f*cked up by that time that they couldn’t, like, shoot my face anymore,” Qualley told host Josh Horowitz.
The actress also revealed that the prosthetics caused acne that stayed even after filming ‘The Substance.’ It continued during her next movie, ‘Kinds of Kindness,’ where she played four roles. Luckily, the acne fit well with the Yorgos Lanthimos drama.
‘The Substance,’ also starring Demi Moore and Dennis Quaid, is about a celebrity who uses a black-market drug to create a younger version of herself. The production designer Pierre Olivier-Persin shared with the Hollywood Reporter that Qualley wore fake breasts made from a live cast of her body.
He said, “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. Then you use silicon or whatever material you are working with, then you stick them on and paint them.”
The prosthetics in ‘The Substance’ played a key role in the movie, especially during the transformation of Elisabeth and Sue into the monstrous Elisasue.
Though the heavy prosthetics affected Qualley’s skin, they contributed to the film’s awards success. It is now in the running for an Academy Award, with nominations set to be announced on January 23, despite delays from the Los Angeles fires.
Demi Moore recently won her first Golden Globe for her role in the film, via NPR.
