In “The Substance,” Coralie Fargeat’s satire of toxic beauty culture, 50-year-old TV aerobics star Elisabeth Sparkle (Demi Moore) transforms into gorgeous 20something Sue (Margaret Qualley). But the youth miracle drug turns to body horror when Sue ignores the treatment’s weekly body-switching caveat. The horrifying metamorphosis finds Elisabeth becoming the decaying mutation called Gollum and both of them transforming into the hideous Monstro.
Yet for prosthetics makeup designer Pierre-Olivier Persin, there was nothing monstrous about “The Substance.” “I don’t see it as the destruction of a woman’s body,” he told IndieWire. “I find beauty in what we do, what we sculpt, and what we paint.”
He even likened the metamorphosis to David Cronenberg’s “The Fly,” with Sue coming out of Elisabeth’s back after her spine splits open. She then has to crudely sew it back together to help maintain her host. This was done with with a sliced open silicone dummy and more dummies for the newborn Sue and the sewing procedure, and final prosthetics on a body double for Elisabeth.
For the start of Elisabeth’s rapid aging as Gollum, Persin and his team began with her deformed finger as a harbinger of more weirdness to come. “And then when half of her face is aged, I remember [telling] Coralie and Demi that we shouldn’t, like in ‘The Fly,’ be too gruesome too quickly,” Persin said. “Let’s go slowly because it will eventually be completely crazy.”
To complete Gollum, they immersed Moore’s upper body in thin silicone prosthetics and then applied thicker appliances to build up some of the bones, knuckles, knees, and elbow. “Coralie wanted the aging process to be like a disease,” added Perskin. “We did weird veins as if it was poisoning the body. So I did them in Photoshop, like a fake tattoo, on a water slide.
“And I transferred those veins and everything on Demi’s skin,” he continued. “And then I applied the translucent silicone prosthetics on top. When you get older, you see the veins on people’s hands and the skin is more translucent. Also, we had a prosthetic [cheek] plumper, just to the side, to give her a weird lower lip.”
For Monstro, which appears at the taping of a New Year’s Eve special and is met with a violent response from the audience, Persin began with a small maquette. Previous stabs at Monstro prior to his coming aboard were deemed too masculine by director Fargeat. So Persin made sure that it resembled Sue. The look is enormous, grotesque, and almost Picasso-like with displaced body parts. “I had several designers and we used every trick in the book: digital design and traditional design,” he said. “Coralie wanted her as if the body was put in a shaker.
Qualley, who had silicone all over her face, also wore a foam latex body suit upon which loads more silicone was piled on. She had one arm facing backward, the other coming out of her neck, teeth biting an out-of-place breast, and a puppet head of Elisabeth on the side. When the scene became a bloody gore fest with the help of the SFX team shooting 30,000 gallons of fake blood, they used a stunt performer in another body suit.
However, the actress’ body suit became like a wet sponge and had to be repainted, resewn, and dried. They even sprayed vodka inside it every night to keep it clean and sanitized. “It was not only a monster, but Coralie really wanted it very tragic at the end of the movie, a bit like ‘The Fly,’ which I love,” added Persin.
For the coda, there was a final mutation called The Blob, with Elisabeth’s puppet face in the center. “Our blob puppet was great, but we couldn’t do that range of emotions on a puppet head,” Persin said. “It was Demi’s performance. So, visual effects came to our rescue for the blob and did all their amazing wizardry.”
