NEW YORK, NY.- Margaret Qualley could finally breathe again.
“I’ve been working a lot,” she said over iced tea at Clark’s, a Brooklyn Heights diner near where she lives with her husband, music producer Jack Antonoff. “I’m relishing these little lull moments.”
Qualley, 29, has more than earned a break. After making a striking debut 10 years ago in the HBO series “The Leftovers,” she appeared in “Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood,” followed by Emmy-nominated performances in “Fosse/Verdon” and the Netflix miniseries “Maid.” In the past year, she starred in “Poor Things,” “Drive-Away Dolls” and “Kinds of Kindness,” and when we met, she had just returned from shooting three back-to-back movies — Ethan Coen and Tricia Cooke’s “Honey Don’t!”; John Patton Ford’s “Huntington”; and Richard Linklater’s “Blue Moon.”
Moviegoers will next see her in “The Substance,” a film that is somehow a departure from all of the above and one she acknowledged was uniquely challenging. Directed by Coralie Fargeat and slated for release Friday, it is a body-horror blood bath in which Demi Moore plays Elisabeth Sparkle, an actress who, attempting to recapture her fading youth, injects herself with a mysterious serum.
The result is Sue, played by Qualley, a younger, taller, “perfect” woman who emerges fully formed from Elisabeth’s body. The two of them must trade places every week, with the one who’s off-duty kept nourished by IV bags of potions. But soon enough, Sue develops a taste for her brand-new world and doesn’t want to be put on ice when it’s her turn to hibernate.
Qualley was in Panama, shooting Claire Denis’ “Stars at Noon,” when she read the script, and was drawn to the prospect of playing a character who seemed “really far from me,” she said.
“It was just very singular, this inverted fairy-tale horror story,” she said. “I had a feeling that it was going to be special.”
“The Substance” was shot mostly in Paris and won for best screenplay at this year’s Cannes Film Festival. Along the way, it ignited debates about whether its extravagant gore and nudity were outrageous fun or a kind of torture porn aimed at the aging.
Moore, who read the script at her agent’s insistence before she knew any details, was fascinated by the film’s unusual subject matter, she said in a video call from Los Angeles. “This could either work, or it could be a disaster,” she recalled thinking. “But if it works, it could have such a cultural impact.”
The physical similarities between Qualley and Moore were important, but so were their differences.
“I was thinking about when I was younger, going: Why didn’t I end up with blue eyes? And Margaret has blue eyes. And why didn’t I end up taller? And Margaret is taller,” Moore said. “I just thought there’s something kind of intriguing about that idea.”
The two women had to spend a lot of time together on a cold tile floor. During one scene, as the cameras were preparing to roll, Moore laughed uncontrollably when Qualley had to fall on top of her. They were both naked. “‘Thank God we like each other, or this would be really awkward,’” she remembered Qualley saying.
“This was not going to be like I was going to be shot and lit to be my most glamorous,” Moore added. “But in a weird way, there was something kind of liberating about that. And I said to Margaret at one point, ‘I feel like I would feel much more pressure if I was having to be the one who was seen as perfect.’”
Moore, a member of the Brat Pack who rocketed to fame in movies such as “St. Elmo’s Fire,” “Ghost” and “Indecent Proposal,” found Qualley to be a focused and fearless co-star. “She has an incredible confidence,” Moore said. “I don’t feel like I see in her the markings of, let’s say, what I experienced when I was younger, which was too much value being placed on the external.”
A few weeks after our initial conversation, Qualley called from London, where a publicity tour for “The Substance” had given her more time to reflect on a movie she had been making or thinking about for more than two years.
“It really points out how hard it is for humans to love themselves and how we end up hurting each other because of our own self-hatred,” she said. “But I also never could have prepared myself for the mind-(expletive) of making it. I think everyone involved had to enter the eye of the storm.”
Qualley was born in Montana to actress Andie MacDowell, who co-starred with Moore in “St. Elmo’s Fire,” and Paul Qualley, a former model who is now a rancher and homebuilder.
Growing up in Asheville, North Carolina, she loved competition-style dance with its rhinestones, false eyelashes and feather boas. Her older sister, Rainey, sewed her costumes. During her teenage years, she moved to Winston-Salem to attend the North Carolina School of the Arts, then to American Ballet Theater’s summer program in New York. Studying ballet at that level, she realized that she was good, but not good enough.
“I saw it as a way to be serious or, I don’t know, get out of the house like my brother and sister — adultify myself,” she said of ballet. “I never liked it that much. It was like vegetables for me. Then I realized it was more a bridge to something else.
She transferred to the Professional Children’s School, a school in New York geared toward aspiring performers, and started taking acting classes and modeling. During her junior year, she flew to Paris for fashion week and booked the Chanel show, where Karl Lagerfeld taught her how to walk the runway.
Qualley got her first acting job at 18, in “The Leftovers,” playing a teenage girl quietly attempting to make sense of an apocalypse, proving in the process that she could stand out in an ensemble. She made even more of an impression as Pussycat, a member of the Manson Family, in Quentin Tarantino’s “Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood.”
“I adore him,” she said of Tarantino. “I mean, nobody loves movies more than he does. It was an honor to be on his set. I’ll remember that forever in every single detail.”
Then along came “Fosse/Verdon,” the FX miniseries about the relationship between choreographer Bob Fosse and his wife and muse, dancer Gwen Verdon. Qualley mastered Fosse’s signature hip rolls and jazz hands to play dancer Ann Reinking, who became his lover.
Qualley had gone from casting in Los Angeles to a work session in New York with director Thomas Kail, one of the series’s creators.
“It was one of those things where it’s like 14 seconds, and I was like: All right, we’re done, I got it,” he said on a video call from Atlanta, laughing. “She had that ineffable thing. And she clearly understood the life of the dancer and the way to communicate physically that I think Annie had. So it was a gift from the heavens.” Qualley was nominated for an Emmy.
She earned a second nomination for “Maid,” playing Alex, an abused woman willing to do whatever it takes to care for her daughter.
“‘Maid’ is the only thing that I feel like people have seen, but that’s great,” Qualley said after taking pictures with a table of birthday celebrants, women and girls, who recognized her at Clark’s.
She was about 24 when she auditioned for the part of Alex. “I just never read anything so substantial for somebody in my age bracket,” she said. “I was really passionate about the idea of playing that character.”
MacDowell, Qualley’s own mother, played her character’s mother in “Maid,” “a once-in-a-lifetime experience,” Qualley said, adding, “She’s amazing in that part, obviously.”
After completing “The Substance,” Coen and Cooke’s “Drive-Away Dolls” and Yorgos Lanthimos’ “Kinds of Kindness,” Qualley took time off to unwind and to plan her wedding to Antonoff. They had first met at a friend’s birthday party and then a couple of years later at a rooftop party at Electric Lady, a recording studio. This time, it stuck.
They were married on Long Beach Island, New Jersey, in August 2023. Taylor Swift — Antonoff has worked on her last 11 albums — was a guest. Lana Del Rey performed her song “Margaret,” which she had composed as a gift for Antonoff.
“I met the love of my life and got to marry him,” Qualley said, adding, “I feel like I’m a little kid for the first time in my life. I’m totally being taken care of in the way I’ve always dreamt of being taken care of.”
She added: “Hopefully, I’ve given him that feeling too. I feel like I can dream bigger because of him and live bigger because of him.”
“Lovely” is an adjective often used to describe Qualley, with her lissome dancer’s body and gracious but occasionally steely countenance — and a laugh that explodes in layers of peals.
Glen Powell, who stars opposite Qualley’s agent of chaos in “Huntington,” said, “She reminds you of one of those actresses of the golden era of Hollywood. She’s able to crack herself open in a way that’s just magnetic.”
Qualley was also described as “game” by more than one person I spoke with.
“I mean, she’s game for anything — she’s a big goofball, so she just throws herself into the part,” Cooke said of working with her on the lesbian crime movies “Drive-Away Dolls” and “Honey Don’t!”
“She’s just so game, she’s so open and free from the get-go,” said Aubrey Plaza, her “Honey Don’t!” co-star. “I felt like we had to do some gnarly stuff together in the movie. Some really vulnerable, intimate things. She’s so playful, and I just felt like, man, we had known each other forever.”
Would Cooke and Coen work on another movie with Qualley?
“Every movie,” Cooke said, as Coen laughed in agreement.
Qualley tends to choose a project based on the person making it, “and I like working with people who know a lot more than I do,” she said.
“I guess for me, I’m just trying to move through life like water in a river and stay agile and move around the rocks, be a part of something greater than yourself,” she added. “Just continue to be as true to myself in the moment as I can.
“I feel like I’m changing so much all of the time every day,” Qualley said of her momentum, both in her career and personally. “I’m kind of continuously on this ride of ‘Oh, now I get it. Oh, now I get it.’”
This article originally appeared in
The New York Times.
