Margaret Qualley has said The Substance’s Monstro Elisasue prosthetics damaged her skin so badly that the production eventually couldn’t film her face. She spent 8 days in the suit and described the experience as “a torture chamber.”
Getting through the creature’s scenes meant working with restricted hearing and movement, crying beneath glued-on makeup and, at one point, having a panic attack. Qualley has videos of herself inside the suit saying, “I can’t do this anymore.” She said she wished Demi Moore had been in the suit with her.
In Coralie Fargeat’s 2024 body-horror film, Monstro merges Elisabeth Sparkle, played by Moore, with her younger self, Sue, played by Qualley. Only able to see through one eye, Qualley kept running into things.
The makeup application took about 5 hours, with roughly 90 minutes needed to remove it, though her estimates varied across interviews. Removal involved holding her head and neck at an uncomfortable angle. When she cried, tears and snot accumulated beneath the glue on her face, and the crew tried to secure it with more glue.
“I only have one eye,” Qualley said of working inside the prosthetics. “I can’t hear anything,” she added, along with “I can’t move my arms.”
Retainers in her mouth also caused cuts. The urge to pull the makeup off came with its own problem: “but of course you can’t do that, because you’ll bring your skin with you.”
The effects lasted beyond The Substance. Qualley said she still had acne 6 months later while making Kinds of Kindness. Discussing the aftermath on the January 13, 2025 episode of Happy Sad Confused, she described “crazy prosthetic acne” and said it “took me probably a year to recover physically.”
