Woman of substance: Vogue cover star Margaret Qualley
After her biggest year yet, the actor is setting her sights on even bolder projects.
Margaret Qualley loves a new year’s resolution.
“I’m a journaler, I love setting intentions, I’m a little witchy, I’ll light something on fire, I’ll do the full moon stuff, I think the girls getting together and talking about their dreams is about as real as it gets,” the 30-year-old actor grins.
This month, the Golden Globe- and Critics Choice-nominated star of acclaimed horror movie The Substance – about an ageing movie star who uses an injection to create a younger clone of herself, played by Qualley – is looking to the future.
Personally, since her 2023 marriage to music producer Jack Antonoff – attended by Antonoff’s A-list collaborators including Taylor Swift and Lana del Rey – and after recently adopting a puppy, who appears on the cover of the magazine alongside her, Qualley’s goals are to send love out into the world.
“I’ve spent my life kind of walking around with this energy that’s like, ‘Love me, love me, love me’. And I feel like I’ve crested into a new territory where it makes sense to say, ‘I love you. I love you. I love you’.”
And professionally? As she puts it in her cover interview with Vogue Australia: “I wanna do movies where I keep my clothes on and I don’t die in the end. The bar is low.”
As an actor, Qualley broke out in Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon A Time … In Hollywood, stealing scenes from under Brad Pitt’s nose as one of the members of Charles Manson’s cult. She went on to star alongside her mother, actor Andie MacDowell, in the Netflix series Maid, for which she was Emmy nominated. But The Substance, which is streaming now, is one of Qualley’s biggest movies, and since its premiere at the Cannes Film Festival has become one of the most awards-buzzed films of the year.
“It’s exciting when something becomes a part of the culture,” Qualley says. “I think that’s what most artists are setting out to do, put enough of themselves into something that it feels somewhat universal.”
Qualley told Vogue Australia about the highs of making the movie, including working with co-star Demi Moore, whose constant red carpet companion, her pint-sized dog Pilaf, inspired Qualley’s own adoption of Smokey. She also got engaged to Antonoff during production, which took place in Paris in 2022, and involved a period of working under prosthetics, which took six gruelling hours to apply each morning. “It was such a healing energy to have while shooting that movie that required me to go to all different places. I was lucky to have a romantic force field during that process.”
Vogue Australia’s January issue is on sale Monday, January 6.
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