Margaret Qualley reveals shock physical toll of filming The Substance

The Substance’s Margaret Qualley said it took “a year to recover” from an unexpected physical problem that arose during filming.

Margaret Qualley really felt the effects of The Substance.

The actress, 30, recently appeared on Josh Horowitz’s Happy Sad Confused podcast and spoke about how wearing extensive prosthetics to shoot the bloody horror film took a toll on her skin.

“It took me probably, like, a year to recover physically from all of it,” she said, reports the New York Post.

“When they’re shooting up my skirt at the end, or in the beginning credits, when it’s, like, the palm trees all around, and they have, like, all these long lenses from the bottom. That’s just because my face was so f**ked up by that time that they couldn’t, like, shoot my face anymore,” Qualley added.

Qualley opened up about the physical toll The Substance had on her.

The actress in a scene from the film.

The Substance follows an award-winning actress (Demi Moore) who loses her job as the host of a popular daytime aerobics workout TV show upon hitting 50. After she takes a black-market drug, she creates a younger, better version of herself (Qualley) — with dire consequences.

Both Moore, 62, and Qualley underwent shocking transformations for the film.

Qualley revealed that her skin damage from The Substance carried into filming for her next movie, Yorgos Lanthimos’ Kinds of Kindness.

“You know the character that has, like, all the acne, like, that was just my acne from the prosthetics,” Qualley said on the podcast.

“And I was like, ‘Oh, this is actually kinda perfect. Like, I’m playing all these different characters,” she noted. “For one of them, we’ll really use all my crazy prosthetic acne.’”

Last month, Qualley told Vogue Australia that shooting The Substance was “honestly really hard” for her.

She plays a younger version of Demi Moore’s character.

She said that director Coralie Fargeat “wasn’t looking for happy accidents. It’s so controlled, so precise. It was very challenging to shoot because I get a lot of joy out of freefalling, out of the feeling that anything could happen at any moment.”

Moore, for her part, told Entertainment Weekly last year how the movie took a physical toll on both her and Qualley.

“We’d hit the weekends and, both of us, did we go out anywhere? We didn’t do anything,” she said. “On rest time, we’d text, I’d go to her apartment. It was two floors down, and we’d be like, ‘I can’t f**king move.’ It was difficult.”

The Golden Globe winner previously revealed that she would spend as much as six hours in the makeup chair to transform into her grotesque character.

“I think the time in the chair is helpful if you can get very still, very Zen,” she told the Hollywood Reporter earlier this month. “It was a slow progression over that time.”

“You can’t really eat or drink because it’s so delicate. Things will fall apart,” she added. “And probably the most challenging is having somebody touch you constantly all the time.”

This article originally appeared in the New York Post and was reproduced with permission.

Originally published as Margaret Qualley reveals shock physical toll of filming The Substance