Margaret Qualley Had "Crazy Prosthetic Acne" After The Substance
"It took me probably a year to recover physically."
A reminder of Margaret Qualley’s extreme facial transformation for The Substance remained with her long after she wrapped filming. The actor, who played the genetically blessed aerobics influencer Sue in the hit body horror flick, revealed that she suffered severe irritation on her face for a long time after making the movie. But there was one small silver lining.
Qualley detailed how the acne she developed from her The Substance prosthetics “f*cked up” her face during her Jan. 13 appearance on the Happy Sad Confused podcast. It got so bad, that even some shots in the movie had to be specifically angled to not show her face.
“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 fucked up,” Qualley said. “They couldn’t shoot my face anymore.”
For much of The Substance, Qualley got glammed up as the beloved celebrity Sue, the younger version of fading star Elisabeth Sparkle (Demi Moore). But in the third act, Qualley’s character goes through a massive transformation, which required the actor to have several prosthetic pieces attached to her face.
However, there was one unforeseen benefit of Qualley’s skin irritation. After The Substance, the actor filmed her other 2024 movie Kinds of Kindness, in which she played four different characters. One of the roles was a woman with acne.
“So, you know the character that has all that acne? That was just my acne from the prosthetics,” Qualley said. “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.”
