Margaret Qualley’s ‘Face Was So F—ed Up’ from The Substance Prosthetics That It Took 1 Year for Her Skin to Recover

Margaret Qualley’s skin went through a lot on the set of The Substance.

In a Jan. 13 episode of Josh Horowitz’s Happy Sad Confused podcast, the Golden Globe nominee, 30, got real about the effects wearing prosthetics for the film had on her skin.

At one point during the interview, the actress said her skin became so damaged that her face was even cut from certain shots.

“Like, at the end, when they’re shooting up my skirt in the beginning credits, and 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—ed up by that time that they couldn’t, like, shoot my face anymore,” Qualley shared.

Her acne lasted after filming for The Substance wrapped and continued when she began working on her next film, Kinds of Kindness.

“So, you know the character that has all that acne? That was just my acne from the prosthetics,” said Qualley, who plays characters Vivian, Martha, Ruth and Rebecca. “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.”

Intense face makeup wasn’t the only thing Qualley endured when she transformed into The Substance’s Sue. In a September 2024 interview with The Sunday Times, the star revealed that she wore fake boobs because director Coralie Fargeat envisioned her character as an ‘80s bombshell with a Jessica Rabbit-type figure.

“Unfortunately, there is no magic boob potion, so we had to glue those on,” Qualley said. “Coralie found an incredible prosthetic team to endow me with the rack of a lifetime — just not my lifetime.”

Qualley’s co-star Demi Moore, who won her first Golden Globe on Jan. 5 for her performance as Elisabeth Sparkle, also underwent a shocking transformation — courtesy of prosthetics that depicted exaggerated wrinkles and other stark features — to tell the tale of dangerous beauty standards and the extreme measures taken to achieve them.

In a previous interview with the Los Angeles Times, the two stars spoke about the prosthetics used by Pierre Olivier Persin, the SFX makeup artist on set, to create Monstro; a mashup of Moore and Qualley’s characters.

“I was in there, with [Demi’s] face plastered onto my own body,” Qualley told the outlet. “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.”