Margaret Qualley: From Maid to the edge of mainstream
Actor Margaret Qualley is blessed with the beauty of her famous mother Andie MacDowell, but her movies have taken a more adventurous path.
Margaret Qualley may have started out with the natural advantage of being the daughter of Andie MacDowell and inheriting her mother’s beauty. But the 28-year-old American actor has come into her own, receiving multiple award nominations for her role in the Netflix series Maid. Now she stars with Joe Alwyn in a romantic thriller Stars at Noon, the English-language debut of French auteur Claire Denis. Qualley is generally more adventurous than her mainstream mum in the movies she chooses.
Set in Nicaragua and based on Denis Johnson’s 1986 novel, Stars at Noon starts with Qualley’s character, Trish, a journalist, selling her body to get by. When she meets the dapper Brit Daniel (Alwyn), it is initially a pay-for-sex deal, but it soon develops into a torrid relationship as she hopes he might help her escape. Who Daniel is and why he is in Nicaragua is a mystery, and Trish’s intentions are not entirely clear.
“They’re both hiding so much, you know, from everyone,” Qualley says. “They’re using the same tricks on each other and it doesn’t quite work out. They see through the guise. It’s a kind of a dreamy, hazy world they are living in.”
Unlike the novel, which is set during the Nicaraguan Revolution, Stars at Noon has been updated to the pandemic era. The film screened in competition at Cannes this year and won the Jury Prize.
Speaking in Cannes, Qualley says Denis (High Life, Both Sides of the Blade) is an incredible storyteller. “She has a really specific take on the world, a really unique way of approaching life and you feel that in her movies. Everything that she does, she does with a great deal of respect and authenticity and care.”
When Qualley arrived in Panama, where the film was shot, she found that Denis had become like a native, eating at a local restaurant and greeting people by name. “She knew everyone’s names as she did at the hotel,” Qualley says. “With her everything is incredibly organic and familial and from the heart, it’s delicate and sensitive. She just has a way of really utilising her environment.”
For the film’s extensive sex scenes there was no intimacy co-ordinator as often happens on American films. Stars at Noon is in many ways very French.
“I think Trish doesn’t have very much respect for her own body,” Qualley says. “I don’t know that she has an incredible amount of ownership of it. Her way of giving is quite literally to give all of herself like she does. I just had to be on board for that as it was such an integral part of the character.”
Shooting those scenes wasn’t as difficult as it might have been because the crew was so small. “It was just me, Joe and Claire and the director of photography Eric Gautier in the room. So it felt really safe.”
When I first spoke to Qualley for her 2017 film, Novitiate, she was like a deer in headlights. Her role in that film as a novice nun, and her portrayal of a troubled straight-A student in the hit series The Leftovers, which she was doing at the time, were vastly different from the roles she would do later. In Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood she was a standout alongside Brad Pitt in a small role as “a freakin’ crazy Mason lady” called Pussycat. “It was a life-changing experience and felt too good to be true,” she says. In Maid she played a mother struggling to support her young daughter and while there was one pronounced sex scene, it was nothing like Stars at Noon.
Qualley, 28, concedes she wouldn’t have been able to play Trish a few years ago. “I think things come to you when you’re ready,” she says.
She confirms she is engaged to musician and music producer Jack Antonoff: “He’s just the best person in the whole world,” she says, adding that it’s good that he works in a slightly different realm to her own.
She is not sure how big the wedding will be. “It’s all very new, but it will be big enough to have all of our family and friends.”
The guests will surely include Alwyn and his partner of five years, Taylor Swift, with whom Antonoff has worked extensively as a songwriter and producer. Qualley’s parents, who split when she was five and co-raised her in North Carolina, will be there with bells on.
“I was born in Montana and then moved to North Carolina when I was four,” she explains. “I did most of my school there, until I was 14, then I went off to a ballet school and my dad lived right by my school and he’d bring me lunch every day. I had a great childhood and I’m really lucky. I loved growing up in the suburbs.”
She studied ballet because her sister Rainey, who is five years older, was a dancer. “I wanted to be her essentially.” At age 16 she decided ballet was not for her. “I had a hard time working out all day every day.”
MacDowell and Qualley’s father, Paul Qualley, had worked as models and they encouraged their daughter to chase whatever career she felt was right. “I think the most important thing for parents is to give their kids attention and to give them a sense of self-belief,” she says.
She didn’t consider acting until her high school boyfriend brought her to an improvisation class when she was 16. “When I laughed and cried and yelled, I was like, ‘Oh my God, I have so many feelings, I must do something with these feelings’. And I really loved it. I got why people love this so much.”
She moved to New York alone at the age of 16 and to make ends meet briefly worked as a model, walking the catwalk for the likes of Valentino and Chanel, for whom she remains a brand ambassador. Naturally shy, she was intent on pursuing a career in acting.
“It was both hard and great,” she says. “I fell in love with New York and I fell in love with acting. I was also so alone and uncomfortable and trying to figure out who I was and what I wanted to do. And it was terrifying. But I wouldn’t change a thing. Movies have changed the way I look at the world and changed everything for me. I’ve been trying to chase that and explore that ever since. I still live in New York, in Brooklyn.”
Her film debut was a small part in Gia Coppola’s Palo Alto and then came The Leftovers. She went on to play one of her heroes, American dancer Ann Reinking, in Fosse/Verdon and was Emmy-nominated for the miniseries, which came out in 2019, the same year as Once Upon a Time in Hollywood.
Yet it was Maid that made her one of the US’s most sought-after young actors. Her real-life mother MacDowell plays her very eccentric mum in the series and I tell her she looks more like her as she’s grown older.
“I think so too – I hope so,” she says. “It was so cool to work with her. It’s just like a big cheat, like a big, big gift to be able to walk into the room and have your real mum be playing your mum. Just the way that you touch your mum’s going to be different, the way you talk to her, the way that you roll your eyes or that you smile. It really touches you. She just made it so easy. And then she’s also just such a phenomenal actress.” Qualley says her favourite film of her mother’s is Groundhog Day.
In Toronto, Qualley premiered her latest film, Sanctuary, in which she plays a dominatrix with a wealthy client who tries to end their relationship. The Daily Beast says it’s a battle of wits where Qualley “delivers a powerhouse performance of eroticised determination and deviance”.
She’s also completed Yorgos Lanthimos’s Victorian sci-fi romance, Poor Things, where she appears alongside Emma Stone; next month she starts a new film, AND, with the same director and Stone. They clearly want to keep a good thing going.
She has just wrapped French director Coralie Fargeat’s feminist horror film, The Substance, alongside Demi Moore and is currently filming Ethan Coen’s solo debut, an untitled comedy co-starring Beanie Feldstein, the younger sister of Jonah Hill.
Another film, yet to receive the green light, is Fred & Ginger, about the famous dancing duo from Hollywood’s golden years. She is set to co-star with Billy Elliott’s Jamie Bell, but the project has clearly been a victim of the pandemic, one imagines partly because of its price tag.
“I think it’d be such fun,” Qualley says. “I’ve worked with Jamie before and I think he’s great and my friend’s producing it. So it’d be like a blast if it happens. We’ll see.”
It could well be the film to bring Qualley to Oscar attention, or at least mainstream attention. Would she like to do a major Hollywood film, maybe even a Marvel adventure, since she is having quite a moment?
“I have no idea, I have no idea,” she blushes, her rosy cheeks reddening even more. “I don’t have any kind of master plan. I really don’t.”
It’s all just a matter of time.
Stars at Noon opens on December 1.
