“The Substance”: Demi Moore delves into bizarre body horror
In “The Substance,” Demi Moore plays a middle-aged fitness star who takes a black market drug that creates her younger self (Margaret Qualley).
Spoiler alert! We’ll discuss major plot points and the ending of The Substance (in theaters now), so beware if you haven’t seen the film yet.
Margaret Qualley can be a real monster when she needs to be.
Demi Moore endured some makeup wizardry in the body horror film The Substance, playing an ageing TV fitness star who takes a black-market drug to regain his youth. But it was her co-star Qualley who wore a special prosthetic suit in the film’s bloody, madcap finale to play a creature that is both grotesque and lovable.
“It was torture,” Qualley says. “I had this amazing team of prosthetic artists who put it on and took it off and got me through the day and made me laugh a few times when I was on the verge of panicking.”
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In “The Substance,” Elisabeth Sparkle (Moore) is forced out of her job when her sleazy boss (Dennis Quaid) wants someone younger and hotter. Elisabeth signs up for a multi-step DIY treatment process to become more “perfect.” The result is a younger new self (Qualley), and they must share an existence as “one” – seven days for the old body, seven for the new, rinse and repeat.
The other person, calling herself Sue, is cast as Elisabeth’s replacement and becomes an instant hit for the network, so much so that she is hired to host a live New Year’s Eve special. Sue likes the parties and the attractive guys that come with fame, and she wants more than just a week. She starts breaking the rules and takes extra “stabilizer” fluid from Elisabeth’s spine. This angers Elisabeth as parts of her body begin to atrophy and age exponentially the more Sue disrupts the status quo.
Sue is forced to give control to Elisabeth when she runs out of fluids, and Elisabeth orders a “termination serum” to get rid of Sue. She gives her an injection, but immediately changes her mind and revives Sue, but then kills Elisabeth for her actions. Sue shows up at the New Year’s show, but her teeth fall out and her body deteriorates, leading her to use the “activator” drug that Sue conceived from Elisabeth out of sheer desperation.
Enter Monstro Elisasue, a B-movie monstrosity who is a combination of the two women and, interestingly, seems to appreciate her body more than Elisabeth or Sue. Qualley loves a “beautiful and touching” moment where Monstro proudly pins an earring to what looks like the front of her face. (One of the weirder aspects of Monstro’s body is Elisabeth’s silently screaming visage protruding from her shoulder area.)
“It was special to finally feel love and emotion, and it came from a place where I was physically weird, even though I find Monstro kind of adorable,” Qualley says. “It was complicated because it was very moving on the inside and on the outside, well, moving in its own way.”
To become Monstro, Qualley spent six hours in a makeup chair getting the prosthetics fitted, and her head couldn’t do much in the suit. “I only have one eye. I can’t hear. I can’t move my arms. I have these retainers in that are kind of too big, they just cut everything off,” she explains. “It was grueling to embody her. But the purity of soul in that moment was so refreshing because I had already been playing (Sue) for four and a half months at that point, who was really hard to relate to. So soulless, man.”
Moore adds that “it’s easier to read on paper.” Once the prosthetics are in place, “you don’t eat. You can hardly drink. You have to be really disciplined.”
Monstro also takes center stage in the film’s most outrageous scene at the end, when the new hybrid creature takes the stage at the New Year’s show. The crowd goes wild, especially when they’re covered in blood that sprays in streams from Monstro’s exploding and regenerating body.
Qualley says they used 30,000 gallons of fake blood and writer-director Coralie Fargeat “actually had a fire hose that she wanted to operate herself.” Qualley texted her co-star videos of the madness. “That was the only week I had off,” Moore says, laughing. “And I got shingles.”
Monstro doesn’t exactly get a happy ending – she escapes, but definitely explodes on Elizabeth’s star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in the film’s final scene. But she remained loyal to Qualley afterward: wearing the Monstro suit caused acne breakouts on Qualley’s face, which can be seen in her next role in “Kinds of Kindness.”
“I hadn’t recovered yet. This was six months later and I was still thinking, yes, Monstro is alive,” Qualley says. “But honestly, I kind of liked the way it looked, so it was OK.”
