Margaret Qualley was left with acne and cuts from the prosthetics she wore for 'The Substance'
The 30-year-old actress plays party animal Sue in the satirical body horror film, who is the "more perfect" version of 61-year-old co-star Demi Moore's Elizabeth Sparkle, and she has revealed it took a year for her skin to recover.
17 January 2025
Speaking on the 'Happy Sad Confused' podcast this week, she spilled: "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***** up by that time that they couldn't, like, shoot my face anymore."
Her face still had blemishes when she started filming her next project, 'Kinds of Kindness', which sees the star play four people.
She went on: "So, you know the character that has all that acne? That was just my acne from the prosthetics.
"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."
Margaret recently admitted the edgy film took her way out of her "comfort zone".
The movie star - who is the daughter of 'Four Weddings and a Funeral' actress Andie MacDowell, 66 - shot to fame thanks to her roles in 'The Leftovers' and 'Once Upon a Time... in Hollywood' and has now opened up about the challenges of shooting her latest role alongside 62-year-old Demi Moore.
She told PEOPLE: "I guess, for me, it's something I've really never done.
"I think I've intentionally gone the other direction throughout my career.
"I knew it was going to be a big challenge for me."
But Margaret added the nudity in the movie was not exploitative and "very much serves the purpose of this story".
She added: "It's a road you have to go down in order to bring this to life. And I was excited about that challenge."
Margaret has told how she got "wasted" on drugs and tequila to get through filming one particularly raunchy scene in 'The Substance'.
She told The Sunday Times: "That specific kind of sexuality doesn't lend itself to me."
Margaret added she cried in a bathroom when she first rehearsed a scene in which her TV aerobics instructor character Sue does a sexed-up dance wearing a skimpy workout outfit, because she felt "so deeply ashamed" making it.
She went on about how she added marijuana and alcohol into the emotional mix to get through the shoot: "And still, day of, I just got wasted first thing in the morning because I was like, I can't do this in front of everybody."
Margaret's Sunday Times profile noted how "a combination of weed and tequila provided Dutch courage".
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