Demi Moore and the women of ‘The Substance’ draw blood

Sitting around a table with actors Demi Moore and Margaret Qualley and writer-director Coralie Fargeat almost feels like therapy — if people had group therapy surrounded by publicists in an upscale London hotel.

“The Substance,” Fargeat’s follow-up to her 2017 debut feature, “Revenge,” is a blood-soaked body-horror film that cleverly confronts aging in Hollywood. Provocative and explicit, the movie (in theaters Sept. 20) upended a somewhat snoozy Cannes Film Festival with an undercutting and often satirical sense of humor. It’s the same sensibility that pervades our four-way conversation at the Corinthia Hotel in late August, where an outburst of laughter can lead immediately to an admission of lingering trauma or a groan-inducing memory.

Even now, a year after wrapping the movie in Paris, Moore, 61, and Qualley, 29, are grappling with what they endured on set.

“To give you an idea of the intensity, my first week that I actually had off, where it was just Margaret working, I got shingles,” Moore says, almost proudly, in her familiar deep rasp. All three are glammed up following our photo shoot, but Qualley has kicked off her heels and they have a comfortable air among them, the way you would if you’ve been through something intense together.

“Oh, yeah, I had crazy acne for a full, long-ass time,” Qualley jumps in.

“And I then lost, like, 20 pounds,” Moore adds. Fargeat just smiles, seemingly with no guilt about putting them through their paces.

Even knowing Moore’s signature turns — 1992’s “A Few Good Men” and the romantic “Ghost” opposite Patrick Swayze — and Qualley’s own standout work in Quentin Tarantino’s “Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood” and the Emmy-nominated series “Maid,” the director knows she’s pushed them to new heights. It was something both Moore and Qualley readily accepted, despite the challenges. (The performance is already gaining serious Oscar buzz for Moore.)

“You have to walk away feeling that you put it all on the table,” Moore says. “It called for it and it’s what you want to bring to it.”

A woman in a robe stands over the body of a woman with a sewn-up back.

In “The Substance,” Moore plays Elisabeth Sparkle, an Oscar-winning, Jane Fonda-esque TV fitness instructor who is fired the day she turns 50. To us, she remains glamorous and beautiful, but her career value has diminished with the years. At least according to loudmouth studio head Harvey (Dennis Quaid), who unceremoniously dumps her while grotesquely eating a bowl of cooked shrimp. Empty of purpose and desperate to try anything, Elisabeth pursues a mysterious back-alley miracle cure that offers her an opportunity to unleash a younger version of herself (Qualley), as long as she shares her time with her younger body, switching off every week. This second self, birthed from Elisabeth’s spine in true Cronenbergian fashion, dubs herself Sue and is hired by Harvey to headline a new show with significantly more sex appeal.

It’s a searing look at Hollywood’s tendency to put an expiration date on everything, especially women, but “The Substance” also came from a personal place for Fargeat, 48, who remembers struggling when she turned 40. She found herself consumed with depressing thoughts about growing older, assuming she would become invisible. Writing the film was a “liberating gesture” as well as a painful one, confronting those fears.

“I wanted to get free of that feeling because I felt that it was something that was so powerful and not only linked with age,” the director says, Moore nodding in agreement. “At each age there is something that you can feel is wrong with you — with the way you look, with the way you feel.”

Fargeat’s precise script features very little dialogue. Instead, it relies on the stylized visual impact of the storytelling, which devolves as Sue breaks the time-sharing rule (because of course she does), refusing to switch back after her allocated week. As a result, Elisabeth’s body breaks down, becoming more and more gruesome, until Sue, in desperation, births a monster of her own. Fargeat takes advantage of cringe-inducing closeups and graphic, uneasy violence to reveal Elisabeth’s complicity in her ultimate downfall.

“That’s what makes it such a powerful piece,” Moore acknowledges. “It’s really what she’s doing to herself that’s most violent. … [The script] took something that is a very internalized violence against oneself and externalized it in this way that allows the audience to have a little objectivity and to then really see what we’re doing to ourselves through that harsh, constant criticism and comparison.”

“I read a tagline in an article about the film recently that said, ‘Being a woman is body horror,’” Fargeat adds. “The movie can be scary on many levels, but the first is about playing with the violence of what we do to our bodies.”

A woman in a yellow suit poses for the camera.

It’s inevitable that audiences will compare Moore with her character, particularly as she herself has faced sexism and ageism from her studios and producers, events she detailed in her notably frank 2019 memoir, “Inside Out.” But Moore says Elisabeth experiences the world from a very specific, self-destructive perspective.

“I think from a human point, I relate, but I’m not Elisabeth,” Moore says. “There are different interpretations that she could have had in responding to [being fired], although we wouldn’t have had the same movie. Why didn’t Sue go, ‘I can run my own show, I can be my own producer’? Instead, she still seeks the same validation, the same approval.”

Sue represents an interpretation of the male gaze — the “male ideal,” as Qualley puts it. It was part of what terrified her about the role: a hypersexualized character who exists primarily to signify an unattainable ideal. Qualley trained for months ahead of last summer’s production last summer, lifting weights to get Sue’s seemingly flawless body, which evokes what Fargeat calls a “shell” of classic female icons like Marilyn Monroe and Jessica Rabbit.

“We’re representing perfect, right?” Qualley says. “And the movie has a pretty inspired message. So I also thought it was important for that perfect to be healthy, even if it’s unrealistic. I’m fortunate that the naked stuff was at the top because throughout the five months my ass was just slowly deflating.”

Moore, unfazed by “The Substance’s” ample nudity, all of it motivated, quips, “I did admire how round Margaret’s ass was.”

Sue’s dance moves proved more difficult. Qualley is a trained dancer, but she wasn’t prepared for how it would feel to embody complete confidence in a scene where she herself wasn’t. There was, in fact, “so much crying” leading up to shooting Sue’s evocative dance number, a Dua Lipa-inspired, twerk-laden calisthenic writhing that wins her the show.

“It’s more of a challenge than I realized, pretending to feel hot when you don’t feel hot,” Qualley says, underscoring one of the film’s central ideas. “I practiced that dance incessantly, every day, until we shot it because it’s so far outside of the way my body moves. But I really enjoyed pushing myself to figure it out.”

Qualley is aware of how much Moore’s generation, which also includes her mother, Andie MacDowell (both appeared in 1985’s “St. Elmo’s Fire”), paved the way for her own. She’s never played a character like Sue simply because she’s always had more options.

“One of the reasons why this movie was exciting for me was because I haven’t really done something head-on like this where the character is superficial and meant to be mega-hot,” Qualley says. “I’ve played a bunch of f— freaks, so I consider myself lucky.”

Ultimately, the biggest hurdle for both performers was the incredible amount of prosthetics in the film, which were created by French makeup artist Pierre Olivier Persin. He and Fargeat took inspiration from the films of their youth, including “The Fly,” “The Elephant Man” and “The Blob,” and Elisabeth’s eventual destination — a devolution into Monstro, a horrific mashup of her and Sue — had to be a true metamorphosis that completely distorted the character. Moore hunched herself under a layer of wrinkled skin for the incarnation of Elisabeth that Fargeat lovingly calls Golem, while Qualley was tasked with becoming Monstro, a process from which she still hasn’t recovered.

“I was in there, with [Demi’s] face plastered onto my own body,” Qualley says as Moore simultaneously confirms, “I don’t think we could have fit both of us in the suit.”

Qualley jumps back in. “I wish you were in there with me!” she says, jolting straight up in her chair. “I was alone in that thing. I was running into things. It was a torture chamber. The amount of videos I have of me like, ‘I can’t do this anymore.’ It was eight days. I know that doesn’t seem like a lot.”

Everyone in the room confirms that it does, actually, seem like a lot.

Qualley, unpacking her trauma from the shoot, adds, “We would just go until I had a panic attack. And the tempting thing is you want to peel it off, but of course you can’t do that, because you’ll bring your skin with you.”

Two actors embrace during a photo shoot.

There are a lot of memorably unsettling moments in “The Substance.” Body parts drop off, skin decays and there is a deluge of blood so tremendous it seems record-breaking. (That scene required 30,000 gallons of blood being sprayed from an actual firehose.) After Moore and Qualley wrapped 87 days of principal photography at Paris’ Studios d’Epinay, the crew spent 30 more days shooting the prosthetics for closeups.

“It was like the crazy lab of a professor,” Fargeat says. “It was kind of like inventing our own way of doing a film.”

The most unsettling moment in the movie, arguably, comes courtesy of Quaid. His role, although small, is one of the most pivotal. The actor stepped in to replace Ray Liotta after the “Goodfellas” star’s death. Quaid became, Qualley notes, “the MVP.” As Fargeat puts it, his character represents “all of the bad behaviors in one person.”

“By far the most violent scene in the entire movie is me having to sit across from Dennis Quaid eating shrimp,” Moore says, laughing but clearly disgusted. “His mouth tearing off the heads — look at it. He’s illustrating exactly what he’s doing to people. He’s ripping their heads off, tearing the tails off, spitting them out.”

“I must say I was shocked what that scene provoked,” Fargeat adds, referencing the screening at Cannes. “Many men didn’t like that scene during postproduction. It became quite powerful in what it symbolized.”

Quaid’s aptly named Harvey is pure satire, but he also stands in for all studio executives who treat women like objects.

“In real life, it might be presented slightly more subtly, but the undertone, the energy, the intentionality is out there in the world like that,” Moore confirms. She remembers a moment on the set of “A Few Good Men” when Aaron Sorkin stood up for her to a studio exec who wanted her character, a Navy lawyer, to sleep with Tom Cruise’s courtroom crusader. When told no, the exec said, “Well, then why did we hire Demi Moore?”

Three artistic collaborators smile during a photo shoot.

“I think that it’s how they were conditioned,” Moore continues, acknowledging that she doesn’t blame the individual as much as she does the system. “It was a part of the accepted conditioning — that of course that’s why they would have someone like me there.”

It’s different now, she thinks, although change has come slowly. “We’ve actually come an enormous distance,” Moore says, slowly and thoughtfully. It’s clearly something she’s considered, but she’s more reflective than angry. “It doesn’t make it OK, but we can’t hit a hammer over it. We have to move [forward]. It really starts with us.”

As our hour-long therapy session comes to a close, Qualley still can’t bring herself to admit that the final film made all her suffering worth it. But the process, as hard as it was, felt genuinely liberating for her.

“In a truly, earnestly positive way, finishing the movie did feel like there’s a reason why I signed up to do this — like there was an itch I needed to scratch,” she says. “I feel a certain freedom having endured the experience.”

Moore echoes that. “That deep reminder of appreciating who you are, as you are, where you are, just resonated more as the process went along,” she says. “And not just the external. Really, all of those internal things of who we are that we often can overlook. And the journey of what it’s taken to get where you are.”

For Fargeat, breaking out in a big way, the catharsis of “The Substance” extends to both herself and to the viewer. “You’re having the movie change you the same way you hope the movie will change the people who [watch] it,” she says. “I felt very liberated and more inclined to self-love.”

It’s a liberation the film offers us too. Ideally, though, with less blood.

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