How ‘The Substance’ Makeup Team Turned Demi Moore and Margaret Qualley Into “Monstro Elisasue” (Exclusive Photos)
(Warning! This story contains spoilers for The Substance).
When talking about the prosthetics job on Coralie Fargeat’s skin-crawling body horror The Substance, it’s easier to tell you what wasn’t prosthetics.
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“Demi [Moore]‘s face on the back of Monstro Elisasue is digital,” the man in charge, Pierre Olivier Persin, tells The Hollywood Reporter. “You know, the screaming face — we had a silicone head of Demi, but it was so subtle, what Coralie wanted. You really needed the actress there.”
He continues: “The blob at the very end, which also had Demi’s face in the middle [is VFX], though we designed it… And when the blood is coming out of Monstro’s arm, there is a stunt woman inside the suit with a green sleeve. Apart from that, everything is practical — absolutely everything.”
The Paris-based special makeup effect artist, who has worked on Game of Thrones and The Count of Monte-Cristo, is now an Oscar nominee. His team earned a nod for best achievement in makeup and hairstyling among four other nominations for The Substance, including best picture and best original screenplay. “Achievement” is apt — if you’ve seen the Moore and Margaret Qualley-led feature, a satirical commentary on beauty standards and the curse of aging in the public eye, you’ll know Persin and the wider crew pulled off something downright otherworldly.
Moore is a middle-aged, has-been superstar named Elisabeth Sparkle, who is ousted from her spot on a daytime television exercise show when the producer (Dennis Quaid) decides he wants someone half her age. Practically tearing her hair out at the thought that she is no longer a 20-something bombshell, Elisabeth takes a black market drug called The Substance, which creates a younger, better version of herself — Sue, played by Qualley.
The pair are routinely reminded of a crucial detail: they are one. But over time, forced to live as Sue only every other week while Elisabeth lies in a dark room with a feeding tube, Qualley’s character begins to abuse The Substance. She rips more and more time away from Elisabeth, who wakes up in a white-hot fit of rage to find she has aged, in a Picture of Dorian Gray-esque manner, at an alarming rate.
By the movie’s climax, Elisabeth is a crumpled shell of a human: myriad body parts sagging, not an inch of skin unwrinkled, and barely any hair left on her head. It was these prosthetics of an elderly Moore that Persin says were the most arduous to apply. “Demi’s the real trooper,” he tells THR. “She’s the best friend you can have in a makeup chair from a professional point of view, especially when you do heavy prosthetics. She was always fun, super professional, helping you.”
Applying those prosthetics was a six-and-a-half-hour job, which so far seems very worth it when looking at Moore’s Golden Globe win and Oscar nomination for best actress. Monstro Elisasue, the backfired product of Sue re-administering the initial Substance activator, was a giant body suit and head that took Fargeat and Persin a long time to conjure — over two months from design to completion.
“Coralie said to me: ‘She’s been put in a blender,'” Persin says of the process to create Monstro Elisasue. “She kept repeating to me one line from the movie when Monstro says, ‘It’s me!’ I think that was really important for her and for us too. It wasn’t a monster that kills people — it’s a tragic character. Maybe in hindsight, it’s the happiest moment for Elisabeth in her body and mind. But Coralie really wanted the elephant woman.”
“Once Coralie was happy with the body, we still didn’t hadn’t found the head yet,” Persin continues. “I remember I kept saying, ‘We need to start working on Monstro, because it’s a big build, for quality reasons.’ And she was like, ‘Not until I’m 100 percent sure that’s the right design.’ I remember she was at the workshop and she saw one of the final mark-ups for the heads. She grabbed me into her arms, saying, ‘Yeah! We’ve got her!'”
Monstro Elisasue was a custom-made suit that began with full body scans of both of the film’s stars. She has one arm on her back, a set of teeth on her chest, and buttocks on the back of her head. In hindsight, the monster struck Persin as almost a little Picasso. “I wanted the body to be lots of boobs and crazy, but I didn’t want it to be sexual,” he continues. “I wanted her to be like a ballet dancer with that big body [but] also full of some grace. And we do three-dimensional characters. They are not a drawing — I wanted her to be interesting at every angle.”
The suit was mostly sculpted by hand, using materials like silicon gels and hyper-realistic puppet heads. When it was finally painted, the team began to add contact lenses, teeth and hair —one strand at a time. Qualley said it took her a year for her skin to recover from wearing the prosthetics.
“It’s very difficult from a psychological point of view,” Persin says, adding that there was a cooling jacket for the suit, “but you can hate it very easily and feel claustrophobic.” Made up of two halves with gloves, feet and suspenders, the actress spent around eight to 10 days in the suit for the blood-soaked finale. “The head took around two and a half hours to fit,” he adds. “Maybe 45 minutes for the suit. It’s like going to the dentist: it’s fun for the dentist, but it’s not fun for you,” — or, in this case, Qualley.
What made Moore’s prosthetics the more time-consuming task? “On Demi, everything was glued to her body because the character is supposed to be so skinny,” the Frenchman explains, laughing as he likens the character to Gollum from The Lord of the Rings. “I didn’t want to use a suit because she’s fully naked — prosthetically naked — and I didn’t want to have weird wrinkles or for her to reduce her movements. With Monstro, we knew we had the blue dress and the movement was going to be less, so it was a different approach.”
Even the oozing and infected sore on Moore’s back, maltreated by Sue, was the work of the 15-strong prosthetics team. “We did that. It was a mix between prosthetics and dummies for a fake back that we built at different stages, so we could use a proper needle going through the skin.”
The end result is an astonishing feat, though Persin is keen to stress his Oscar nomination is a team effort shared with fellow nominees for The Substance: Stéphanie Guillon, Marilyne Scarselli, and the wider crew. He still can’t help but tell the story of the moment he received the news last week. “I was on set for an American movie that we’re shooting in Paris, and the first AD came to me, and she asked, ‘So have you heard about the nominations?’ And I said, ‘Yeah, I got the nomination.’ And she said, ‘Oh, my god, that’s amazing. I have to make an announcement,’ so everybody cheered and clapped, the whole crew. That was really nice.”
Persin has heard the wide range of audience reactions to The Substance — many that have been very personal, he points out. “It’s awesome. But during the shoot, you are in the middle of the storm, and some days I was going back into my car in the parking lot of the studio, thinking about my work… Some days you have low days, you don’t see the bigger picture and you’re just tired.”
He continues: “But I would have never thought about all the awards success. I’m really happy about that.”
On Fargeat’s best director nod — the only female filmmaker to have earned one this year — Persin says: “It’s well deserved. I know that she was fighting for quality. She was fighting to get the best movie possible and fighting for the right people, if she had to. No compromises. Coralie really wanted to go far,” he adds. “And she’s not shy at all.”
The Substance is available to watch now on MUBI.
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