The actress shares that her skin was already so “f–ked up” with “crazy prosthetic acne” towards the end of filming the body horror flick they “couldn’t shoot my face anymore.”
Margaret Qualley says her role in The Substance stuck with her long after filming wrapped — literally.
During a recent appearance on the Happy Sad Confused podcast, the actress — who plays Sue, the younger version of Demi Moore’s Elisabeth in the body horror flick — revealed that the prosthetics she wore in the film “f–ked up” her skin, saying that it took “a year” for her skin to fully recover from the acne.
According to Qualley, her skin was so irritated by the end of the shoot that director Coralie Fargeat had to make adjustments.
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“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–ked up by that time,” she recalled. “They couldn’t shoot my face anymore.”
Production wrapped in October 2022, with Qualley going on to shoot Yorgos Lanthimos’ Kinds of Kindness shortly after. In the comedy/drama, she played four characters: Vivian, Martha, Rebecca, and Ruth.
And while her skin was still broken out from the prosthetics she wore on The Substance, Qualley said it ultimately worked out in her favor for one of her roles in Kinds of Kindness.
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“So, you know the character that has all that acne? That was just my acne from the prosthetics,” she explained. “And I was like, ‘Oh this is actually kind of perfect. I’m playing all these different characters. For one of them, we’ll really use all my crazy prosthetic acne.’ It took me probably a year to recover physically from all of it.”
Both Qualley and Moore have received accolades for their performances in The Substance. The actresses were both nominated at the 2024 Golden Globes in the supporting and lead categories, respectively, with Moore taking home the award for Best Performance by a Female Actor in a Motion Picture – Musical or Comedy.
Moore and Qualley are also both nominated for the Critics Choice Awards along with the film. Moore, meanwhile, also received nominations at the 2025 Screen Actors Guild Awards and BAFTAs, as well.
For The Substance, Moore plays an aging actress in the film who obtains a black market drug to create a younger version of herself (Qualley) in a bid to remain relevant — with disastrous consequences.
