Let’s have a big round of applause for Margaret Qualley, who has just qualified for membership into the League of Actors Who Made Extreme, Lasting Physical Changes for a Role. Usually, these actors are men who’ve either gained a ton of weight to play a superhero or men who’ve lost a ton of weight to play the lead in an Oscar-bait film. But what about Qualley, who sacrificed her skin for a year for The Substance?
Qualley went on the Happy Sad Confused podcast in January, and confessed that the prosthetics she wore in The Substance messed up her skin so bad that by the end of filming they had to find ways to avoid shooting her face.
“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 fucked up by that time that they couldn’t, like, shoot my face anymore,” Qualley said. This wasn’t a problem that stopped as soon as The Substance wrapped, either.
Courtesy Everett Collection
Margaret Qualley said she had acne that persisted for about a year, including when she began filming for her next project, Kinds of Kindness, in which Qualley plays four characters.
“So, you know the character that has all that acne? That was just my acne from the prosthetics,” she 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.”
An actor messing up her face for a movie about impossible beauty standards in Hollywood? And then using that acne for character development in another movie? That is method acting on a plane that male actors haven’t even dreamed of. Brava.
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