However, it was Netflix who raised the idea of Kristen playing the title character.
“I wanted an actress who would fall into it in a really relaxed, natural way. And from our first meeting at Netflix, after they bought the idea, immediately for them, it was like, ‘It’s Kristen Bell. It’s Kristen Bell no matter what. It is Kristen Bell. That is who it is’,” Erin recalled to Harper’s Bazaar.
“They have worked with her many times before, and they are obsessed with her. They love her.”
Erin Foster
via Associated Press
She continued: “We had a meeting, and she was so respectful, nice, and complimentary, and she very clearly, very quickly said, ‘Erin, I know you wrote this for yourself to be in. I’m not comfortable taking this role away from you’. And I said, ‘Well, first of all, it doesn’t sound like I really have a choice, so let’s do this’.”
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However, Erin had another reason for not wanting to take on the part, as she was trying to get pregnant at the time, and has since welcomed her daughter, Noa.
“I said to her, ‘The truth is, I want to be a mum. I’m trying to get pregnant, and that’s really my life focus right now, becoming a mum. I don’t want to be sitting in a hair and make-up trailer at 5am’,” she said.
Erin added that she was very happy with the way things turned out, insisting: “It would’ve been way too much. I was really trying to get pregnant, and I knew that those two things happening at the same time wasn’t going to work. And so I was kind of giving her my blessing. Like, ‘I want it to be you. I don’t want it to be me’.
“And after that, it just sort of all fell into place. She really wanted us to cast Adam, too. They had a personal relationship, outside of it, a friendship. She felt really confident that they would have great chemistry. And she was right. She’s got a really great instinct for casting. She had really good ideas.”
Kristen Bell was responsible for helping Adam Brody get cast in Nobody Wants This
Kemi Badenoch has insisted she does not think statutory maternity pay is “excessive” as a row over her views overshadowed the first day of the Tories’ annual conference.
The leadership contender had appeared to suggest that the amount of money given to new mothers was too much in an interview on Sunday morning.
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She later said she had been “misrepresented” as she was forced to clarify her stance.
Speaking to Times Radio’s Kate McCann, Badenoch said: “Tax comes from people who are working. We’re taking from one group of people and giving to another. This in my view is excessive.”
Asked by McCann is she believed maternity pay was excessive, Badenoch replied: “I think it’s gone too far the other way in terms of general business regulation.”
Badenoch’s leadership rivals, James Cleverly, Tom Tugendhat and Robert Jenrick, all distanced themselves from her remarks.
The former women and equalities later posted on X: “Contrary to what some have said, I clearly said the burden of regulation on businesses had gone too far… of course I believe in maternity pay! Watch the clip for the truth.”
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In a further post, with an accompanying video, she said: “Of course maternity pay isn’t excessive…no mother of 3 kids thinks that.
“But we must talk about the burden of excessive business regulation otherwise we might as well be the Labour Party. My campaign is different from others because tell hard truths. It is how we will renew our party, our thinking and our politics.”
Great day at conference and enjoyed some robust media conversations. I don’t shy from difficult topics, but I won’t be misrepresented. Of course culture matters but we need to talk about integration.
Of course maternity pay isn’t excessive…no mother of 3 kids thinks that.
Badenoch also clashed with Laura Kuenssberg over an article she wrote for the Sunday Telegraph in which she said some immigrants to the UK “hate Israel”.
Asked to explain who she “specifically” meant, Badenoch replied: “I know what you’re trying to do, Laura. You want me to say Muslims when it isn’t all Muslims, so I’m not going to do that. I’m not going to play this game.
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“I should be able to say that I have made an observation without you trying to portray it as me attacking a particular group.”
The party’s annual gathering usually has those at the top leading the whole event, but the former PM – who is still leader until November – has taken the almost unprecedented step of not speaking from the main stage at all this year.
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Allowing the spotlight to fall on the four remaining contenders vying to replace him, Sunak just made a 15-minute “thank you” speech to party members away from the main hall.
Speaking to a room – which was not exactly packed to the brim – Sunak was quick to apologise for leading the party into its worst set of election results ever.
He said: “I am only sorry that your efforts could not deliver the results you deserved.”
But one person in the crowd heckled him, saying: “It wasn’t you!”
He received further support when he confirmed that this would be his last speech to conference as the Tory Party leader, as another mysterious attendee shouted, “We love you, Rishi!”
He did not respond.
The former PM also wasted no time in criticising Labour, whom he claimed were trying to “rewrite history”.
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New PM Keir Starmer has blamed his more unpopular decisions – like restricting the winter fuel payments to those on pension credit – on the £22bn black hole Labour claim the Tories left behind in the government finances.
Sunak said conference this year was clearly such a “hot ticket” that he was surprised the prime minister “hasn’t asked someone to buy it for him”.
He added: “Socialists always run out of other people’s money, something Lord Alli is finding out as we speak.”
Lord Alli is a Labour donor who has been in the spotlight this month over the amount of freebies Starmer has declared since 2019.
Sunak concluded his speech by saying: “I do want to finish with a final ask of all of you.
“Whoever wins this contest, give them your backing.”
He continued: “We must end the division, the backbiting, the squabbling. We must not nurse old grudges but build new friendships.
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“We must always remember what unites us rather than obsess over where we might differ, because when we turn in on ourselves we lose and the country ends up with a Labour government.”
Tory leadership candidate Kemi Badenoch has suggested that statutory maternity pay is “excessive”.
According to the government website, new mothers are legally entitled to 90% of their average earnings for six weeks, followed by a maximum of £184.03 a week for the next 33 weeks.
But appearing on Times Radio this morning, Badenoch – a former women and equalities minister – said the exact amount was “neither here nor there”.
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She said she was in favour of parents taking “more personal responsibility” rather than burdening businesses with more regulation.
The MP said: “Maternity pay varies depending on who you work for, but it is a function, where it’s statutory maternity pay. It is a function of tax.
“Tax comes from people who are working. We’re taking from one group of people and giving to another. This in my view is excessive.”
Asked by presenter Kate McCann is she believed maternity pay was excessive, Badenoch replied: “I think it’s gone too far the other way in terms of general business regulation.
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“We need to allow businesses, especially small businesses, to make more of their own decisions. The exact amount of maternity pay in my view is neither here nor there. We need to make sure that we are creating an environment where people can work and people can have more freedom to make their individual decisions.”
But McCann hit back: “Well it’s here nor there for people who can’t afford to have a baby, isn’t it?”
Badenoch replied: “We need tohave more personal responsibility. There was a time when there wasn’t any maternity pay and people were having more babies.”
McCann then told her: “Well that’s because women often had to not work. They had to stay at home. So is that the solution?”
The former cabinet minister then accused the interviewer of “putting words in my mouth”.
She added: “The point I’m making, Kate, is that we have got to a point where government isn’t working anymore and it’s tinkering everywhere. Me giving you an exact amount of what maternity pay should be when circumstances are different everywhere is not where we’re starting from.”
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Her comments soon sparked criticism from her leadership rivals.
Robert Jenrick said the Conservatives should be “firmly on the side of parents”, adding: “Nobody says it is easy having kids, why would we want to make it harder?”
Tom Tugendhat claimed he had not seen the context of her comment but that it is “important that women have the ability to choose how to live their lives”.
James Cleverly said: “When it comes to working mothers the cost of childcare is too expensive.
“It was government meddling that made it expensive.
“Let’s make childcare cheaper so that mums who want to can go back to work and can afford to do so.”
Badenoch later responded to the backlash, writing on X: “Contrary to what some have said, I clearly said the burden of regulation on businesses had gone too far… of course I believe in maternity pay! Watch the clip for the truth.”
The Canterbury MP announced her shock decision in an interview with the Sunday Times.
Duffield, a former Labour whip who was first elected as an MP in 2017, identified the decision to axe winter fuel payments for millions of pensioners, as well as keeping the two-child benefit cap, as the main reasons for her move.
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In her resignation letter to the PM, she said: “Although many ‘last straws’ have led to my decision, my reason for leaving now is the programme of policies you seem determined to stick to, however unpopular they are with the electorate and your own MPs.
“You repeat often that you will make the ‘tough decisions’ and that the country is ‘all in this together’. But those decisions do not directly affect any one of us in parliament.
“They are cruel and unnecessary, and affects hundreds of thousands of our poorest, most vulnerable constituents. This is not what I was elected to do. It is not even wise politics, and it certainly is not ‘the politics of service’.”
Duffield also condemned the “sleaze, nepotism and apparent avarice” which has seen the PM, his wife and other senior Labour figures accept clothes, concert tickets and other hospitality from supporters.
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“The sleaze, nepotism and apparent avarice are off the scale, she said.
“I am so ashamed of what you and your inner circle have done to tarnish and humiliate our once proud party.”
Duffield, who has clashed with Starmer in the past over the issue of trans rights, has grown increasingly critical of the prime minister in recent weeks.
In a direct attack on the PM, she wrote: “As prime minister, your managerial style and technocratic approach, and lack of basic politics and political instincts, have come crashing down on us as a party after we worked so hard, promised so much, and waited a long 14 years to be mandated by the British public to return to power.
“Since the change of government in July, the revelations of hypocrisy have been staggering and increasingly outrageous. I cannot put into words how angry I and my colleagues are at your total lack of understanding about how you have made us all appear.
“How dare you take our longed-for victory, the electorate’s sacred and precious trust, and throw it back in their individual faces and the faces of dedicated and hardworking Labour MPs?”
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Duffield added: “The Labour Party was formed to speak for those of us without a voice, and I stood for election partly because I saw decisions about the lives of those like me being made in Westminster by only the most privileged few.
“Right now, I cannot look my constituents in the eye and tell them that anything has changed. I hope to be able to return to the party in the future, when it again resembles the party I love, putting the needs of the many before the greed of the few.”
If you’ve seen The Substance in a cinema over the last week, the chances are you’re still thinking about some of the film’s more extreme moments, mulling over the amazing performances from Demi Moore and Margaret Qualley or perhaps just trying to wrap your head around exactly what it is you just watched.
But if you’re anything like us, you might have also been pondering exactly how such a uniquely stylised film – with all of its stomach-churning body horror and physically demanding sequences – came to be.
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Well, you need wonder no more. From the script to the screen, here are 17 behind-the-scenes facts you probably never knew about how The Substance actually got made…
First of all, director Coralie Fargeat fully never expected Demi Moore to say yes when she first sent her the script
Coralie Fargeat and Demi Moore at the Cannes Film Festival
via Associated Press
“To be honest, when her name came up, you know, when we were thinking about actresses, I said, ‘Oh, forget it. She will never want to do something like that. Let’s not lose time, you know’,” Coralie admitted to People magazine at the initial premiere of The Substance.
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“And then I said, ‘Well, we have nothing to lose. Let’s just send the script’.”
And it’s a good thing she did, because we truly can’t imagine any of Demi’s peers playing Elisabeth Sparkle quite like she did.
Lead actors Demi Moore and Margaret Qualley already had a bit of a connection before they were cast
Margaret Qualley and Demi Moore forged a strong bond while making The Substance, despite only sharing minimal screentime
via Associated Press
Of course, Demi worked with Margaret’s mum, Andie MacDowell, almost 40 years ago in St. Elmo’s Fire.
However, there was another connection, as Margaret was also friendly with the Ghost star’s children, Rumer, Scout, and Tallulah Willis, so before they were even on set, she told People “we felt like we knew each other”.
In keeping with the types of films that inspired it, Coralie was keen to rely mostly on practical effects rather than computer trickery, CGI or AI
“I would sometimes suggest we use VFX and she would immediately say no, because she doesn’t like VFX,” prosthetics designer Pierre-Olivier Persin told GQ.
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“It’s really a movie about our bodies and about the reality of how we feel in our bodies. I needed to speak to the reality of the way our flesh can reflect our mental deformation, and I knew this had to exist for real,” she told The Hollywood Reporter.
One of the film’s only bits of CGI came at the end, when Demi Moore’s screaming face was added to the back of Monstro Elisasue, a character who was otherwise achieved entirely with prosthetics.
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Meanwhile, realistic dummies were also constructed to help with the “birthing” scenes.
“We had quite sophisticated silicon dummies. We had two for the birth. We also had matching prosthetic makeup on the body double and some days we applied the makeup on Demi,” Pierre-Olivier told Marie Claire.
One thing that wasn’t real was the film’s Hollywood setting, though
Coralie explained to Rue Morgue: “We shot 100 percent of the movie in France.Cinema, to me, is the art of illusion, and that’s what I really enjoy when I make my films, to be able to cheat stuff.
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“So the house was entirely shot on a set, on a stage. A huge part of our prep was deciding how we were going to recreate the view of Hollywood [from Elisabeth’s large window]. It was a major research-and-development thing, thinking about different techniques and finally using the one that would give the most life and the greatest sensation of being inside the location.”
She added that rather than recreating a “realistic” Hollywood, she wanted to “create my version of Hollywood, the one that we all have in our unconscious minds”, putting together a “kind of enhanced vision of Hollywood that fit the story”.
Despite appearances – no, that is not Hollywood
Demi Moore’s prosthetics journey took her character through five different stage, with each part having its own nickname
These were known – pretty self-explanatorily – as “Requiem” (inspired by Ellen Burstyn’s character in Requiem For A Dream), “The Finger”, “Gollum”, “Monstro” and “Gremlin”.
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Before Elisabeth’s decline begins, Pierre-Olivier admits that he and Coralie clashed over how the character should look.
“I had a bit of a fight with the director because I told her that she had to be beautiful in the beginning,” he revealed to Marie Claire.
“It had to be like, ‘Why would they [fire her]?’ Because she has everything, she’s beautiful, she still has a show that’s going on very well – so I wanted for her to be sparkling and beautiful.
“Coralie was telling me, ‘No, no, no, she cannot,’ and I said, ‘Coralie, I have to have the time for her to go down deep before she has all the prosthetics and all of that’.”
Debates were had about whether Elisabeth should be glamorous at the beginning of The Substance
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If you’re wondering, all those prosthetics could take Demi Moore as long as six hours to put on
And then another two hours to take them off without doing any damage to the actor’s skin which, in the middle of a tightly-scheduled film shoot, is pretty important.
Margaret Qualley really struggled with her own prosthetics
“It was torture,” she told USA Today. “I had this awesome team of prosthetic artists that put it on me and took it off of me and got me through the day and made me laugh a couple of times while I was just on the brink of panic.
“I only have one eye. I can’t hear anything. I can’t move my arms. I’ve got these retainers in that are like too huge, they just kind of cut everything. It was grueling to embody.”
She added to The Times: “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.
“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.”
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Margaret’s final transformation truly needs to be seen to be believed
Oh, and Margaret Qualley was also wearing prosthetics you mightn’t have even known were there
According to Margaret, Coralie Fargeat had envisioned Sue as a curvaceous “Jessica Rabbit”-type.
“Unfortunately there is no magic boob potion, so we had to glue those on,” she told The Times.
“Coralie found an incredible prosthetic team to endow me with the rack of a lifetime, just not my lifetime.”
Yes, Demi Moore and Margaret Qualley really did have to learn all those aerobics routine
Margaret described her own dance sequences as “brutal”, and later admitted she needed a bit of liquid courage to get through the day.
“I just got wasted first thing in the morning because I was like, I can’t do this in front of everybody,” she told The Times, claiming a combo of tequila and weed helped her through that difficult day.
Margaret Qualley as seen during Sue’s aerobics set-up
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For Demi, the most difficult part was the infamous scene in front of a mirror
After setting up a date with an old school friend, Elisabeth is about to head out for the evening, when she becomes distracted with thoughts of Sue, and repeatedly removes and reapplies her makeup.
“It was very difficult,” Demi told Variety, describing the scene as “one of the most heart-wrenching moments in the film”.
Apparently, Coralie required as many as 45 takes for the shot, (15 for each of the three makeup set-ups), until it reached “a point where I couldn’t do it anymore”.
Elisabeth roughly removes her makeup in The Substance
In fact, Demi said, it was actually the make-up team who intervened, which Pierre-Olivier confirmed to be the case to Marie Claire.
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“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 anymore because she’s going to have a rash all around the face’,” he recalled.
“Coralie said, ‘Yeah, yeah, yeah, okay, okay, 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.’”
“Normally you don’t do that! But it was too much because it was very hard on her skin,” he revealed.
All that hard work really did take its toll on both Demi and Margaret
Demi told the LA Times that for the week of shooting where she wasn’t needed on set, she ended up contracting shingles – “and I then lost, like, 20 pounds”.
For her part, Margaret said that eight days on set wearing enormous prosthetics led to her breaking out in “crazy acne for a full, long-ass time”, the effects of which she claimed could still be seen in her other 2024 film Kinds Of Kindness.
Despite all of the body horror in The Substance, Demi had a surprising choice when naming the ‘most violent’ moment of the film
Apparently, she still crings every time she sees Dennis Quaid eating all of that shrimp. And if you’re wondering, he ate it all for real, with Coralie estimating the actor probably ate around “two kilos” of shrimp while filming.
Dennis Quaid in Demi Moore’s least favourite scene from The Substance
“I will just warn everyone, the scene with Dennis [Quaid] eating the shrimp is by far the most violent scene in the whole movie. He ate, I think, four pounds of shrimp, tearing the heads off with sound effects,” Demi recalled to Seth Meyers, while gagging.
Dennis Quaid was actually a late addition to The Substance
He took over the role of Harvey from Emmy winner Ray Liotta, who was cast in the film in 2022, but died before filming got underway.
Ray Liotta
via Associated Press
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And his character’s name, Harvey, was no coincidence either
“Not at all!” Coralie said with a laugh when asked by Rue Morgue if the reference was unintentional. “To me, that’s part of the craziness of filmmaking – how with just a first name, you can characterise a whole type of person.
“It says so much about those stories that we heard everywhere, and then that kind of exploded with this specific figure, and now just this name, Harvey, can represent something that has existed in society on many different levels.
“I love to work with symbolism, and the symbolism of that name was definitely powerful and strong.”
But what about the other characters’ names in that case?
“For Sparkle, it was this idea to shine, to be under the light, and to have this moment that means happiness,” Coralie told Collider.
","type":"video","meta":{"author":"Collider Interviews","author_url":"https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC5KD40UCDRUbR-od7sp9cuA","cache_age":86400,"description":"Writer-director Coralie Fargeat taps into something primal with her body horror movie, The Substance. \"I want to let this violence go out and hopefully make a change,\" she told Perri Nemiroff while at the Toronto International Film Festival for her movie’s North American premiere. Violence and beauty may not go hand-in-hand with a large part of society, but for people who identify as women and those who feel the weight of beauty standards, the two can often be synonymous when it comes to appearance and self-image. After all, beauty is pain, right?\n\nIn The Substance, Demi Moore, a Hollywood icon as both an actress and a standard of beauty herself, plays Elisabeth Sparkle, an A-list celebrity who’s peaked. 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“‘Elisabeth’ – I don’t know why it came that way, but probably because it had this iconic resonance of all the big movie stars in the past.
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“I remember at some point, somebody tried to make me, in production, maybe, change the name because we didn’t want to have legal issues, or I don’t know why. I said, ‘No. No way’. I don’t know. I knew this name was important.”
Interestingly, Coralie said she picked Sue as she felt it had an air of youthfulness, while Margaret pointed out that it also made the speaker make a sexualised mouth shape when saying the character’s name.
Let’s talk about that shower of blood in the finale, shall we?
“It was like a fire hose. It’s like what the firemen are using to put fire down; it was the same stuff with blood,” Pierre-Olivier told Marie Claire.
“I knew the scene needed to be massive,” Coralie also told Entertainment Weekly, estimating around 36,000 gallons of fake blood were used, which she said was essential “because the movie is about flesh, blood, and bones”.
And since we’ve gone this long without mentioning it – yes, those nude scenes were the real deal, and yes, that made things a little awkward on set
“We had to do these moments of switching, on this cold tile floor, and we’re both nude and laying there. There’s an aspect of it that was so absurd and funny,” Demi told Entertainment Weekly.
“Knowing that we had each other, looking out for each other, it’s just impossible not to find the absurdity of it humorous. At some point, I said, ‘Thank God we like each other, because otherwise this would be really awkward!’”
