To ring in the new year, The Substance star Margaret Qualley took to social media to share a new behind-the-scenes look at her transformation into the grotesque Elizabeth Sparkle/Sue hybrid known as Monstro Elisasue, and it's not a pretty sight.
If you haven't seen the movie yet, the story focuses on an acclaimed actress turned celebrity host of a daytime exercise program (Demi Moore) who gets replaced by a younger star, sparking a confrontation between the two women that ultimately turns violent.
At least, that's the pre-release logline!
Moore's character, Elizabeth Sparkle, makes use of a secret cell replicating procedure to produce a younger, "more perfect" version of herself, Sue, played by Qualley.
Essentially two halves of the same person, Elizabeth and Sue soon become rivals, and end up breaking the "week on, week off" rule. Sue gets a taste of fame and decides not to wake Sparkle up, but continues to extract the serum from her older self's body needed to maintain her survival. Elizabeth begins to age rapidly, ultimately becoming a shrivelled husk.
When the serum dries up, Sue begins to fall apart (literally), and is forced to wake Liz, resulting in a brutal fight.
Sue is able to kill her older self in vicious fashion, but with no more serum, she takes the drastic measure of injecting what remains of the one-use-only Activator. This creates a monstrous hybrid mutant, with protruding limbs and Sparkle's face left fused into its back in a permanent scream.
"So at that point, I am in layers and layers and layers of prosthetics," said Qualley in a recent interview. "I’ve had it glued to my face. I can’t see out of one eye, I can only see out of this eye. I can’t hear. My head is [tilted to the side]. My arms are glued to my body. The only thing I can move is my right hand, and I’ve just also burnt my hair. All of this stuff is practical. All of this stuff is real. We’re doing it in real time. I’m really frying the hair. I’m really popping the earring in. And it’s kind of a race because it takes so long to organize those moments because of how elaborate the prosthetics are that it’s a quite simple shot, but I think by that time I’d really understood the… It was at the very end of the shoot, the musicality of the film. And there is such a kind of beat to it. The volume of the performance is so high. You’re really accelerating. And so you know that by that moment that it’s almost like being a human within a cartoon world."
Check out Qualley's NSFW photos at the link below.
"Have you ever dreamed of a better version of yourself? You should try this new product: The Substance. It changed my life. With The Substance, you can generate another version of yourself: younger, more beautiful, more perfect… Just share the time. One week for one, one week for the other. A perfect balance of seven days. Easy, isn’t it? If you follow the instructions, what could go wrong?"