Who would ever want to turn Demi Moore into a monster? That’s precisely what director and writer Coralie Fargeat does in Moore’s latest film, The Substance, which is in theaters now. And as it happens, the transformation is a career-defining role for Moore.
In the film, Moore plays Elisabeth Sparkle, an actress who, on her 50th birthday, is fired from her long-running fitness show. In her grief about losing her job and aging, she begins taking a drug, referred to as “The Substance,” that promises to make her into a better and younger version of herself.
Taking The Substance is not exactly what it seems. Elisabeth essentially births, in quite grotesque fashion, a younger version of herself, called Sue and played by Margaret Qualley. There are processes that must be followed to keep Sue and Elisabeth separate. When Sue goes haywire and ignores those rules, there are unexpected, monstrous side effects that slowly change Elisabeth’s body in disgusting ways.
At different points in the film, prosthetics are used to turn Moore’s body into a hunchback with no hair. Her kneecap at another point looks like a chicken drumstick with pale blue veins popping out. An open wound at the bottom of her spine slowly gets infected throughout the film, oozing with green pus.
Special effects artist Pierre Olivier Persin is the person behind Moore’s physical evolution throughout the film. (His previous credits include Game of Thrones and Avengers: Infinity War.) He tells The Daily Beast’s Obsessed that 70-80 percent of Elisabeth’s bodily changes are prosthetics, and the rest is visual effects—which was something that Fargeat wanted. “My favorite part was that she wanted to use as many practical effects as possible,” he says. “I love visual effects, but in a world of AI, that was really a big change. Sometimes I was pushing to use visual effects and CGI and she was like ‘No, no, no.’”
They worked together for nearly a year on the prosthetics for the film. Persin was also on set and says that the shoot was as intense as the film’s script and the evolution of Moore’s Elisabeth.
“[Moore] was the real trooper,” he says. “She was never complaining. She was with us all the way through looking in the mirror and looking at every detail, sitting still. [She was just] the dream actor for us.”
Daily, depending on which iteration of Elisabeth was shooting, Moore had to sit through getting prosthetics put on for a time ranging from a quick 45 minutes to nearly six-and-a-half hours, which was what was required for a shower scene in which Elisabeth reacts to the new version of her body that’s all sagging liver, spotted skin, yellowing thick nails, and a bulging back. “She has the full leg prosthetic, full arm, full back prosthetic. Then the face and the wig. Plus, it has to go under water and everything needs to be waterproof,” Persin recalls about the scene.
As Elisabeth’s body begins to deteriorate into quite literally a monster, the different suits they worked on had corresponding nicknames.
“The first stages of Demi’s aging process was Requiem because of Requiem for Dream,” he says, about scenes in which half of Elisabeth’s body begins to mottle and age, a reference to Ellen Burstyn’s character. The next stage, where she grows an enormous hunchback with a sagging ass, was called Gollum. And the ultimate monster—the boob-filled mashup between Elisabeth and Qualley’s Sue—was Monstro.
These transformations all begin with just one finger. After Sue neglects the specific rules of taking the drug, Elisabeth is left with one gnarled finger, greatly reminiscent of the Evil Witch in Snow White. Getting the finger just right was important since it’s just the beginning of Elisabeth’s transformation for the rest of the film.
“We were making stuff at the workshop, and I decided to test the finger because that is the starting point of everything,” Persin says. “When I tested it, I thought it looked too big and goofy and I hated it. We were building all the other prosthetics at the time and I stopped everyone in the workshop saying, ‘If the finger doesn’t work, everything that follows won’t work.’” So they began to redo everything based on the finger; Persin says they probably redid everything about twice.
Persin and Moore also worked closely with the makeup and hair departments. For example, after the finger, one side of Elisabeth’s body wrinkles and her silky long hair becomes a wiry frizzy gray mess. At that stage, they designed sculptures for the one side of her body that becomes deformed, and worked the hair into that at the same time. Persin then worked closely with the wigmakers.
After Sue neglects Elisabeth for what seems like weeks, the path to full monster is nearly complete, revealing Elisabeth to be a hag-like creature—the Evil Witch in Snow White again remains a good comparison, with Elisabeth now having a ton of wrinkly, loose flesh, sagging breasts, and a giant hunchback.
There was a body double for Gollum, but Moore herself also wore the suit. Persin says the practical prosthetics were important to make the changing flesh more visceral. “I didn’t want to just go for a rubber suit, so it was silicone. It was more than a suit. It was more than prosthetics. Most of it was glued onto the body so it moved well. For instance, the bum was sagging a little bit. We had hollow spaces inside the breasts and the bum so when she was walking, it was jiggling the bum.”
But the Gollum is just a warm-up for the film’s shocking final act. When Sue has to reckon with her own body changing, the drug morphs them into something entirely new—a gargantuan monster of flesh, teeth, hair—that has Sue’s one blue eye and Elisabeth’s frozen screaming face.
Lovingly called Monstro Elisasue, it took Persin and his team nearly a month to just design the hybrid of the two characters. “The head is a little bit like a female Elephant Man,” he says. “That was what Coralie wanted, the sensibility of The Elephant Man, the David Lynch movie. We spent lots of time designing Monstro with all the breasts and trying to balance everything. Is she fat enough? How many boobs? Maybe we should add a jaw here. Maybe we can [add a spine], because there’s lots of spines in the story from the very beginning.”
They scanned the design and sent it to a UK company, who built the Monstro Elisasue suit. Persin and his team then constructed the Elisabeth blob that ends the film: the exploding heads, and everything else that comes out of Monstro Eliasue’s body in the bloody finale.
There’s so much happening in that finale—Monstro decked out in her finest, presents herself to an audience and then all hell breaks loose. What starts it off is Monstro, in a mix of vomiting and birthing, releasing a sole breast from the inside of her body. That breast is controlled by Persin, using puppeteering to release it from the suit.
“I love puppets. Technology is great, but sometimes you can get a very nice organic feel with puppetry. The boob coming out of Monstro, that was me puppeting the boob. After 10 takes, because everything was quite heavy, I had no strength left in my arm.”
Extricating a boob from a monster’s body isn’t the wildest thing in the film’s metal-music-set finale. Eliasue appears on the New Year’s Eve show Sue was supposed to host, and she’s seemingly comfortable in her monster skin. But when the audience begins to heckle her, she snaps—out Carrie-ing Carrie White. There’s blood and gore spraying everywhere, which was done by the special effects team. They built a rig that shot a fire hose filled with the blood into the audience, which was all stunt people due to the power of the hose.
There was a full Monstro suit for a stunt double, but since it was made of foam latex, it was soaked with blood and rapidly turned pink. There was also a half suit which Qualley actually wore for the finale scene to play Eliasue so her actual eye could be acting for her one eye that is left after all the carnage.
“Coralie really wanted a performance, so all the closeups were on Margaret,” Persin says. “She was a real trooper. During prep, I was against it. I was like, ‘It’s only one eye and it’s going to be very tough on her.’ Coralie was like, ‘It’s a performance. I want the actress.’ She was right because it’s really moving and strange what’s happening, and we really need Margaret inside the suit. So all that was Margaret.”
Fargeat also spent her own time in the Monstro suit. The shots of the blood shooting into the audience from Monstro’s POV were her holding the camera, sans head, but in the suit because the arm was inside the blood rig.
The idea of performance is one that’s so important to the film, so when ending it with a blob with Moore’s face on it, Fargeat wanted that facial expression. Persin and his team built a puppet blob that they moved around for the scene, and visual effects were used to put Moore’s face on top of it.
Complimenting someone on how disgusting and crazy their work is on a film could be seen as an insult, but for Persin and his team, it’s high praise. “I’m happy you say that because we worked a lot [on it].”
