With Love, MARGARET

Margaret Qualley has made her own name in the family business, thanks to breakout roles in Once Upon a Time...in Hollywood and The Substance. Now, with The Dog Stars on the horizon, she presides over an adoring corner of the internet, where the fandom fawns over everything from her marriage to Jack Antonoff to the slight gap between her teeth. But she didn't really want to talk to MARISA MELTZER about any of this—at first

MARISA MELTZER

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Margaret Qualley walks into Clark's, a diner in Brooklyn Heights, carrying her little dog, Smokey, in her arms and is immediately intercepted by an employee who tells her she can't have a dog inside. "I'll be back in 10 minutes" is the first thing she says. She lives nearby with her husband, the musician and producer Jack Antonoff. I suggest taking a walk. "Do you want to just come over?" she asks. I had wondered what the actor who so often portrays an unassuming allure would be like stripped of the mediation of the screen. But I can tell as the words are coming out of her mouth, she's already changing her mind about having a writer see the inside of her home. "I can have my husband meet me downstairs. It's a mess. " When Qualley returns, she appears effortless—she'swearing a hoodie and Uggs and orders hot water with lemon.

She seems reluctant to talk about her relationship with Antonoff, whom she met at a party in 2021, other than saying, "I've always been very love-oriented. I've always been looking for my person, and I met Jack. " They wed in the summer of2 02 3 on Long Beach Island, New Jersey, where they have a home. The area was mobbed with fans looking for a glimpse of Taylor Swift, who attended, along with Channing Tatum, Zoe Kravitz, and Cara Delevingne. Qualley wore a Chanel dress and flats and danced all night. She also doesn't wish to share anecdotes about any of those boldface, fairly private guests, such as Lana Del Rey, who sang at the wedding, or Del Key's own wedding, which she attended.

Will Qualley and Antonoff have kids? "Yeah, for sure," she says. I jokingly ask if she has names chosen. "If I did, I wouldn't talk about it," she says. She's similarly circumspect on the topic of her mother, the actor Andie MacDowell, the Groundhog Day and Four Weddings and a Funeral star (who appeared on two Vanity Fair covers before Qualley was born). "She gives me little nuggets of advice," she says. Onwhat, she trails off.... Qualley is a good actor but not so talented that she can hide her reluctance to talk about MacDowell. I didn't even get into her past relationships with Shia LaBeouf and Pete Davidson, as she was already squirming visibly.

She understands our collective curiosity, even if she doesn't love being the focus of it. "I do not look down on gossip," she says. "I think gossip is cavemen. Gossip is survival." Her social life is visible enough thatwhen photos behind the making of Kendrick Lamar's GNXalbum were published, Antonoff was shown in the studio and Qualley could be seen hanging out. She looks like a fun person to be friends with. But she is also a sort of forceful body, the kind that fuels the life of an omnivorously creative celebrity but stops short of being a regular on Page Six. Perhaps she wants to be a household name with boundaries, or treated more like a renowned male actor of the Leonardo DiCaprio blueprint. For now, Qualley is content to pursue a high-wire act of keeping her personal life unexplored and remains an enigma to the public.

"I don't feel like I'm always good at representing myself publicly in real time, so I would almost rather say nothing at all? Because rather than have the wrong idea about me, someone just wouldn't have any idea about me," she wrote later in a text message.

Her ability to withdraw is enabled by the fact that she has the kind of face you can project a lot of ideas and assumptions onto, with big, round doll eyes and real-person teeth, fair skin, dark hair, full lips, and the lithe body of the dancer she is. She looks like a lanky version of Snow White. At age 31, she has been cast as an ingenue for 10 years, an archetype of a woman exploring innocence and experience that matches her exterior.

But she has become a critical darling not just for her look but the physical commitment and psychological remove that's apparent in the roles she chooses. Qualley first gained traction on successful series such as The Leftovers, Maid, andFosse/Verdon. She took smaller but showy roles with auteur directions, such as an art student-cumstraight-talking muse in Richard Linklater's Blue Moon, a wayward hippie who joins the Manson family in Quentin Tarantino's Once Upon a Time...in Holly wood, a stunted woman-child in Yorgos Lanthimos's Poor Things, a journalist in Claire Denis's Stars at Noon, and, for two Ethan Coen capers, a queer private investigator in Honey Don't! and a woman in possession of a mysterious briefcase in Drive-Away Dolls.

One thing Qualley has always had going for her, which belies a zaniness that has made her stand out from her cohort of young actors, is her affinity for side projects that dip into the delightfully odd. She danced her way through a Kenzo World short Him shot by Spike Jonze, making a long advertisement for perfume into something actually memorable. She costarred in another for Chanel, a house she has long had a relationship with, playing the girlfriend of A$AP Rocky who goes about her life in New York with the wonder and strange reality that director Michel Gondry can conjure. She has performed in a James Bond tribute at the Oscars andjoined All Fours author and director Miranda July in an online performance piece about physical longing.

In 2024 Qualley stepped into full-blown movie stardom with the darkly comic body horror The Substance, playing a younger, souped-up version of Demi Moore. "TAeSwfoto/zcewasreallyintense," she says. Inagoodway or a bad way? "Both. " She instantly loved the script—it read like an animated feature—and not just that, but she understood the literalization of the horrors of aging and pressure to be pretty. "I feel hot for like three days a month," she quips. She's talking about ovulating.

And now that she has overcome her caginess, she is learning to crack herself open.

"I DO NOT LOOK DOWN ON GOSSIP," SHE SAYS. "I THINK GOSSIP IS CAVEMEN. GOSSIP IS SURVIVAL."

Qualley has seen what the Hollywo od machine can do. Her parents—MacDowell, the actor, and father Paul Qualley, who was a model—divorced in 1999; her father later moved to Panama while her mother continued to make movies. Even from their childhood perch in Montana and later the college town Asheville, North Carolina, Qualley and her siblings embraced the spotlight to different degrees. Her sister, Rainey, is a musician, and her brother, Justin, has done a good job of staying under the radar. Still, the three Qualley siblings remain very close, and (based on photos of the children's weddings) MacDowell and the senior Qualley seem like committed co-parents.

In some sense, she had a normal childhood, complete with classic Southern tropes of loving grits and sweet tea and hanging out at Waffle House. Much of her early years were spent in the world of competitive dancing jazz and modern along the lines of Dance Moms. She can still do an aerial, which is like a cartwheel without hands. For high school she left home to go to boarding school at the University of North Carolina School of the Arts. In those days she still went by Sarah Margaret, her given name and the name many members of her family and old friends still call her.

That competitive-dance side stayed with her and in many ways informs the actor she is today. "I remember a teacher saying to me in front of everyone, 'You're dancing like a peacock when you should be dancing like a pigeon,' " she recalls. "I think I interpreted that as I'm physically asking for too much attention." She was not, essentially, doing what young dancers were expected to do—blend in.

At 16, Qualley moved to New York City and quit dancing. She lived in a series of downtown apartments and modeled for IMG, including for Chanel. By her early 20s, Qualley says, "Iwas controlling my body and my body had control over me: I must go to sleep now, must wake up now, must work out now." She was auditioning for acting roles and lived a highly disciplined and regimented life.

Why she acts or how she does it she has a hard time putting into words. "Acting is kind of like magic, and magic stops being magical if you try to explain it," she says. There is a French phrase, 1'esprit de 1'escalier, for remembering the right thing to say only after the fact. Qualley, who often has an easier time finding her words later, is the kind of person the phrase was made for. Like so many young women, let alone ones leading public lives, she is struggling to figure out how and in which ways to take up space and when to hide behind blending in. In a text she writes, "I love my job. I love being alive, and I love how alive I feel when I'm acting."

Jacob Elordi, Qualley's costar in the upcoming Ridley Scott movie The Dog Stars—an adaptation of Peter Heller's prescient 2012 novel about people surviving after an infectious disease kills 99 percent of the population, which is currently slated for an August release—tried to sum up her talent. In an email he wrote, "Margaret Qualley keeps it real, it's a requirement. A genuine pleasure to work with an artist like that, she demands the truth. She also reminded me howimportant it is to stay limber." I ask Qualley if he is talking about being literally physically limber or something more symbolic. "I hope it's a dual meaning," she says with a laugh.

Her Blue Moon director, Linklater, thinks that "Margaret's secret sauce is that dancing background—her unique movement and physicality. There is something elegant in her. She's a master of her own body." But what impressed him the most was her work ethic. "She was ready to work, and that's all we did. We rehearsed every weekend for weeks. Some actors resent that, like, 'Don't tell me what to do. ' But she was on a journey to find this character. " He points to a scene near the end of the film where Qualley's character, a wise-at-20-years-old Yale student, delivers a nearly 10-minute monologue to Lorenz Hart's washed-up, semi-closeted lyricist, played by Ethan Hawke. "Margaret contributed quite a bit to the spirit of it. She made it very clear as a woman who had had guys falling in love with her her whole life, this idea oil love you, just not in that way. That's the death blow of the movie, and she knew that [feeling] so damn well."

Hawke has been thinking about the burden of being a young female actor—his own daughter, the Stranger Things actor Maya Hawke, is a friend of Qualley's. "Whenever someone is an ingenue, you think..." He pauses. "Margaret is not what you imagine. She's a spitfire and funny and inappropriate in the best ways. " He would like to see her take Katharine Hepburn-style roles, with the same intensity and strength and humor. "She's been through a lot, she's a serious young woman, she sees through a lot. She's not desperate to please, in away that's really charming. I have met alot of young ingenues who are afraid that if they work too much, something will be revealed."

Aubrey Plaza, who was in Honey Don't! with Qualley, would also like to see her lean into female comedy. "She does a lot of intense movies, and she's so gorgeous and is asked so much as an ingenue, but she has got such a fun, childlike energy about her, just doesn't have an ego. She's not afraid to humiliate herself or be weird," she says, relating to the knowingness that Hawke sees in Qualley. According to Plaza, they are both introverted extroverts who work hard and thenwant to go home. Between takes, Qualley and Plaza would power walk up and down the street or roll around on the floor to keep their energy up. It is apt that Plaza, who has always projected such a dry, cunning humor that she has never played the innocent, sees the places Qualley could go.

Her coworkers vouch for a humor and a warmth that Qualley herself struggles to communicate to nonactors, or at least to strangers like me. Plaza explains that movie sets are the kind of place where you can feel like you've forged a bond with someone for life and then never see them again after shooting. That is not the case with Qualley. "I met her at a hard time for me, and she's there. We don't get to be physically together a lot because of our schedules, but she'll check in on me. I'm the kind of personwhere I don't reach out when things are hard, and she was very good about reaching out and keeping in touch and asking me how I am. Even when she's in the throes of shooting a million movies in London or Italy, she will call to ask me how I am."

"WHEN I FIRST STARTED ACTING, I WAS JUST OVERWHELMED. I FELT LIKE IF I WAS FULLY MYSELF, WOMEN WOULD HATE ME AND MEN WOULD HURT ME."

Being a woman as beautiful as Qualley, who is so convincing as muses and innocents, can mean that Hollywood, and maybe the whole world, never really gives you the benefit of an inner life. It's hard to feel comfortable with translating your interiority when people connect so fiercely with your outer, adorned self.

After encountering Qualley at the Brooklyn diner and interviewing her costars, and after she admits to being guarded in our first meeting, I get a text from her with a kind of manifesto about life. "I love my husband, my family. I love dancing and horses. I love the moon. Happy crying is the best. I love listening to Tara Brach and books on tape. And anything Jack writes. Female friendships are so holy, shout out Talia Ryder. My sister was my Erst soulmate. I wanna die on a farm. I need to learn how to drive stick, my brother tried to teach me but Iwas 12 and it didn't land. Smokey, dog, god. I love you world, thank you for having me."

The whole monologue feels bighearted, a little dramatic, and not one bit jaded. It's authentically Margaret Qualley in her shaggy truth. It's also the person that Plaza says she knows—a woman who will keep in touch and check in, even after her time on set or obligatory few hours in a restaurant with a journalist is over. I explain that that is the person I would have rather met at the diner. She doesn't have to talk about her mother or husband or Taylor Swift, despite the public's and my own deep and obvious interest, but surely there has to be some topic she is willing to open up about in earnest.

So three weeks later we reconvene at the bar at Chez Nous in Greenwich Village, this time with Smokey, a journal, and a list of notes on her phone of points she would like to make. She is once again dressed casually in an oversized sweater with her hair swept up. It's busy, but no one seems to notice or recognize her. She orders a Cabernet Sauvignon.

She has been thinking a lot about the kind of femininity she wants to embrace in the future, perhaps inspired by The Substance, perhaps by getting older. "I started working so young, and when I first started acting, I was just overwhelmed. I felt like if I was fully myself, women would hate me and men would hurt me. And so that took away some of the tools that come with being a woman because I was scared. Gradually, now that I feel like I have more control of my life, I can kind of lean more into the sensual and the feminine," she says. "Jack has helped me for sure, because he has made me feel more confident to explore all the parts of myself. But I'm also thinking about Mother Earth and the divine feminine and surrender. Those are the things I'm trying to lean into, that moment in my life. "

Surrender is a word she repeats in her head as a reminder, as are the ideas of pace and slowness. They are not things that come naturally to her, not physically as a dancer who knows how to push her body, and not as an actorwith ambition. "I'm supercompetitive with myself, and I'm very driven," she says. "I have learned the lesson of my eyes being too big for my stomach professionally. That means taking all the opportunities I can get and then crashing and feeling like I have a schedule I can't keep up with." She's taken on roles she thinks were mistakes. "When I say mistakes, I don't mean it was the wrong thing, I mean I wouldn't do it again."

Qualley is choosier about her projects now, both because she's learned to be and because she's earned it. In The Dog Stars, Qualley will play Cima, short for Cimarron, and describes making the Him as "a different scale of filmmaking than I'm used to. " It's also a different kind of part, one of a fully grown woman who has loved and lost, seen it all, and somehow is moving forward.

In the future she'd like to take on roles that explore her own darkness. She now thinks of filming a movie as one long meditation—she is a faithful student of twice-a-day Transcendental Meditation. "I used to use my job as an excuse to check out of my life. I find that now staying checked in to my life is the best medicine. " That idea of relentlessly staying in the present reminds me of what her colleagues like about her, how Elordi said she reminds him to stay limber and Plaza praised her for keeping in touch. When she finds out I teach restorative yoga, she takes my number for a class and invites me over to instruct her at her in-home dance studio. Qualley is exercising the discernment and workmanship that she's honed in her acting, but this time it's meant to communicate that she didn't quit on me or this project of getting to know each other, even when she wasn't obligated to ever see me again. A few days later a bouquet of two dozen pink roses arrives at my desk. She's not afraid to wield her considerable charm.

Back at Chez Nous, Qualley is about to leave to meet her husband nearby at Electric Lady Studios but first has a story. She recalls speaking to a woman, a French osteopath, who was the kind of wise and witchy person who can give all manner of advice. "I thought she said, 'You have to have passion,' and I was like, T do!' But really she said 'patience.' And I thought, Okay, that misunderstanding really encapsulates fucking everything."