Margaret Qualley's Face Took a Year to Recover From 'The Substance' Prosthetics

The Substance is a fictional horror movie, however, some of its transformations turned out to be very real, and even semi-permanent, according to one of its stars Margaret Qualley. The actor recently spoke about her prosthetics for the film in an episode of Josh Horowitz’s Happy Sad Confused podcast and revealed that her face suffered so much that it could no longer be seen on camera.

“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?" Qualley recalled. "That's just because my face was so fucked up by that time that they couldn't, like, shoot my face anymore."

Qualley stars in the film opposite Demi Moore, who plays an aging film star Elisabeth Sparkle. Sparkle takes the "substance" in order to transform into Sue (Qualley) but there's a catch: the pair must switch back every seven days. If they don't, Sue will begin deteriorating (and, it turns out, so will Sparkle).

After she wrapped The Substance, Qualley immediately started work on Kinds of Kindness, the three-in-one film in which she plays Vivian, Martha, Ruth, and Rebecca. The actor told Horowitz that it took her "probably a year to recover physically from all of it."

“So, you know the [Kinds of Kindness] character that has all that acne? That was just my acne from the prosthetics,” she explained. “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.'"

Of course, Qualley wasn't the only member of The Substance cast to undergo a significant transformation during the film. Moore "sat in the makeup chair for six hours a day," according to The Hollywood Reporter. “Demi was willing to do as much as possible,” production designer Pierre Olivier-Persin said.

The film has so far garnered dozens of nominations from Cannes, the BAFTA Awards, the SAG Awards, and the Golden Globe Awards, the latter of which earned Moore her first-ever award win, for Best Performance by a Female Actor in a Motion Picture.

"In those moments when we don't think we're smart enough or pretty enough or skinny enough or successful enough or basically just not enough, I had a woman say to me, 'Just know, you will never be enough, but you can know the value of your worth if you just put down the measuring stick,'" she said in her acceptance speech. "And so today, I celebrate this as a marker of my wholeness and the love that is driving me and the gift of doing something I love—and being reminded that I do belong."

Read the original article on InStyle