Revealed: What really sparked Demi Moore and Margaret Qualley’s feud with Substance director, writes ALISON BOSHOFF

Panic attacks, horrifying prosthetics, skin damage leading to year-long acne and a feud which has lasted for ten months – the story behind the making of The Substance with actresses Demi Moore and Margaret Qualley is very nearly as sensational as the film itself.

The movie, by rising French auteur Coralie Fargeat, 48, was a surprise hit when it was released last September.

Telling the story of Elisabeth Sparkle, a middle-aged actress who injects herself with The Substance in order to regain her youth, it led to a career revival for Demi Moore, who won a Golden Globe for her portrayal and was hot favourite for the Best Actress Oscar earlier this month.

What went largely unnoticed in the lead-up to the Academy Awards were the issues between Moore, co-star Qualley and ‘exacting’ Fargeat, who had realised her creative vision for the film down to every last scene, but alienated her leading ladies in the process.

As a source told me this week: ‘Look, we all know that, by reputation, Demi can be a diva — but Coralie is much worse.’

Moore, 62, didn’t thank Fargeat from the stage when she won a Screen Actors Guild award last month – a huge omission that won’t have gone unnoticed.

She and Fargeat attended dozens of events in the run-up to the Academy Awards earlier this month, but the pair contrived to spend minimal time together — even when they found themselves in the same room.

Sources say they were ‘essentially on no speaks since Cannes’.

Moore and Fargeat ‘were barely speaking to each other, if at all, by the end of the campaign’, said entertainment journalist Matthew Belloni, founder of US news website Puck, calling it ‘the quietest feud’.

Meanwhile Fargeat’s relationship with Moore’s co-star Qualley seems to have been even more difficult. It’s notable that Qualley doesn’t follow Fargeat on Instagram – although she follows the account for the film – and she hasn’t tagged or mentioned the director in any posts she has made about the movie’s success nor her experiences during awards season with Demi Moore.

I’m told there were ‘substantial tensions’ during the four-and-a-half-month-long shoot in France – not least over Fargeat’s insistence that Qualley should spend up to nine hours in make-up to portray the hideously deformed Monstro Elisasue at the end of the film. You can see Qualley’s point: only her eye was visible in the scene.

The 30-year-old actress, the daughter of Moore’s old friend Andie MacDowell, was left with long term skin issues after the shoot, due to all the prosthetics.

Fargeat knew exactly how she wanted the different versions of the two characters to look and unusually relied heavily on prosthetics rather than special effects, meaning her actresses had to have latex pieces painstakingly applied and peeled off daily for week after week.

Qualley said the effects on her complexion could be seen in Kinds Of Kindness, the film she made after The Substance.

She said: ‘You know the character that has, like, all the acne – that was just my acne from the prosthetics. I was like, “Oh, this is actually kinda perfect. Like, I’m playing all these different characters. For one of them, we’ll really use all my crazy prosthetic acne.” ’

She went on: ‘It took me probably a year to recover physically from all of it.

‘When they’re shooting up my skirt at the end, or in the beginning credits, when it’s the palm trees all around, and they have all these long lenses from the bottom, that’s just because my face was so f**ked up by that time that they couldn’t shoot my face any more.’

She reflected on the experience of playing Monstro Elisasue: ‘I was in there, with [Demi’s] face plastered onto my own body… 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 any more.” It was eight days. I know that doesn’t seem like a lot. We would just go until I had a panic attack.

‘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.’

Executive producer Alexandra Loewy said she did not know of any skin issues suffered by Qualley, but she was aware of ‘lingering psychological effects’ from acting in the body horror film.

Loewy said Fargeat felt the elaborate transformation was crucial to the success of the picture.

‘Coralie just knew it had to be Margaret (in the suit), because there was so much performance captured in the eyes.’ Another scene which caused issues was the mirror scene, one of the most powerful in the whole movie, in which Moore violently scrubs off her make up.

Fargeat wanted up to 45 takes of that scene – 15 for each of three make-up options. Eventually the make-up artist stepped in and said that it had already been too damaging to Moore’s skin.

Moore said she reached ‘a point where I couldn’t do it any more’.

Make-up artist Pierre-Olivier Persin said: ‘My concern was she’s going to hurt herself. At the end, I did something that I never did on a movie, ever. I told Coralie, “That’s enough. You cannot do it any more because she’s going to have a rash all around the face.”

‘Coralie said, “Yeah, yeah, yeah, OK, OK, no problem.” But of course after the 11th [take], she said, “We are going to do it once again,” and I took the remover pad and I squashed everything, and I said, “I removed everything, that’s over. You have already 11. You cannot have more because tomorrow she will have a red face.”’

In a promo interview, Moore said of the process: ‘It’s definitely an easier read on paper… it was extremely taxing.’

She added that she had taken the movie ‘one day at a time’, adding: ‘It was hard, it was really hard.’ To make matters worse, during a week off, Moore contracted the painful viral infection shingles.

Moore also commented on how careful she needed to be when removing her own prosthetics: ‘It was always an hour and a half to get off. Two hours, roughly,’ she explained. ‘It’s glued. You have to be as careful if not more careful taking it off so you don’t destroy your skin.’

By the time of the Cannes film festival in May, when The Substance had its premiere, Moore and Qualley were ‘not really speaking’ to Fargeat, and it seems that this tense state of affairs has continued.

Moore did manage a gracious comment on social media post-Oscars, writing: ‘As this awards season comes to a close, I’m so overwhelmed with gratitude for this journey. It’s been the ride of a lifetime and we’re just getting started!

‘So grateful for my team, my fellow nominees, and everyone who has made this experience so full of joy and light.’

Addressing Qualley and Fargeat specifically, she wrote: ‘It’s been such an honor to work alongside you, learn from you, and celebrate this film with you.’

And to Oscar-winner Anora actress Mikey Madison, she offered: ‘Can’t wait to see what you do next.’

It seems safe to say that, whatever Moore does next, it won’t be with Coralie Fargeat.