Although otherwise “The Substance” had monstrous luck at the 2025 Academy Awards, Coralie Fargeat’s horror film starring Demi Moore did walk away with one Oscar for Best Hair and Makeup Design, as it was favored to do. Now, however, producer Nicolas Royer has weighed in on acrimony between members of the hair and makeup team that has been brewing both before and after the Oscar ceremony.
You might well think that an entire team would qualify equally for an Academy Award; or that one single representative, the department head, would automatically be the nominee for an Oscar category. But each Hair and Makeup nomination is limited to three nominees. This in part reflects the complex way that prosthetics, hair design, and conventional makeup all work together to transform actors into characters and still caps the number of award winners. But it’s a complicated compromise.
The nominees aren’t just self-selected, either. The Academy’s Makeup and Hair Branch Executive Committee goes through the packets submitted for awards consideration by individual artists and decides, based on materials submitted and interviews, which three artisans will be the nominees for each film. This vote is private. In the case of “The Substance,” the nominees were special makeup effects designer Pierre-Olivier Persin, key makeup artist Stéphanie Guillon, and key hair artist Marilyne Scarselli.
Key hair artist and hair department head, Frédérique Arguello, has been saying publically that she was unduly passed over for Scarselli, her assistant, who took over as a key hair artist for 15 days at the end of the shoot, notably on Elizabeth’s and Sue’s (Margaret Qualley) final form. Both Arguello and Scarselli were part of the team that won BAFTAs and Critics Choice Awards, so it is the Academy limitation that has created the issue.
Now, as reported by Deadline, Royer has sent a letter to the Association of Production Managers to defend Scarselli from being blacklisted, writing “Frédérique Arguello and Marilyne Scarselli both held the position of Head Hairdresser on the film ‘The Substance.’ Frédérique intervened more in preparation for the search for looks and during part of the shooting. Marilyne took care of the main actresses more, in conjunction with the Special Makeup Effects team.”
The special makeup effects are, in many ways, the black heart and shriveled, self-hating soul of “The Substance.” On an episode of the Filmmaker Toolkit podcast, Fargeat spoke about how the huge prosthetics informed the leaps that Demi Moore’s Elizabeth makes as the film goes on.
“You can’t test it, you can’t put it on in rehearsal a week before to try the body language, to try everything. Basically, it’s going to be on the day,” Fargeat said. “[Those] were the most challenging shooting days because it was maybe six to seven hours of makeup to get to the final stage of the character and then we maybe had two or three hours left to find the performance.”
Splitting the contributions of Arguello and Scarselli misses the evolution in the makeup and hair design that ends up making the film so visceral, pun intended. The fallout, much like “The Substance” itself, perhaps demonstrates that the Academy needs to remember ‘you are one.’
