Margaret Qualley: ‘New York feels very cosy to me…LA feels like I’ll never be good enough’
Margaret Qualley covers AnOther Magazine, and the interview is a lot better than the photos. The photos are too arty, I guess. Qualley is a beauty, but I don’t think her beauty is particularly gritty or hard-edged. She’s just pretty in a gangly-girl-next-door sort of way and the editorial didn’t really reflect that. Qualley spends much of the interview reflecting on her big breaks, which included Fosse/Verdon, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood and the Netflix series Maid. She’s only 27 years old, and at some points she talks as if she’s very wise, but most of the interview she sounds much younger than her age. Some highlights:
Working with Brad Pitt. “He’s all the things you want him to be.”
Quentin Tarantino telling her to try whatever she wanted to do: “You forget that you’re supposed to be messy. You’re supposed to take up all the space and make all the mistakes, and you’re supposed to do the thing you feel. But it’s so scary sometimes.”
Growing up in Asheville, North Carolina: “My mom was the only actor in Asheville, so it makes you a bit more on display, and people are interested when there’s nothing really interesting going on.”
Her ballet pursuit: “And then at a certain point I realised that ballet was more sophisticated and the pinnacle of perfection. So I was like, OK, I should do that…. The obsession really was about being perfect.” Aged 16, after attending a summer programme held by the American Ballet Theatre in New York, Qualley had a dark night of the soul. “I realised you don’t even love this. You’re just doing this because you want to be perfect, and you’re about to waste your whole life because you’ll never be perfect.”
She developed an eating disorder in her teens. “I was really hard on myself when I was in high school and modelling, and just trying hard to be perfect at everything, and be a perfect student, and a perfect model,” she says. This was a pre-body-positivity time, when high-fashion models were uniformly size zero. “Hopefully now there’s more body inclusivity and celebrating all of the different variations of bodies, and how beautiful that is, and how versatile beauty is in general. It’s wild that we shift through people with the same criteria in mind, that people have checklists. I’ve been a victim of that, and it’s a dark, ugly place to exist.”
Her mother’s daughter: “I think I’ve been protected in a certain way my entire life because of that. I was put into a different category and there’s definitely a protective shield that I feel is related to being my mother’s daughter.”
She likes being New York-based: “New York feels very cosy to me. LA feels scary. LA feels like I’ll never be good enough.” In New York you can throw a dime in most directions and hit a celebrity. “Nobody gives a sh-t. No one stops me. I really am not terribly recognised. And any recognition I get from my work is great because I want to touch people. I’m telling these stories because I want them to be watched.”
On ‘Maid’: “For young women, we’re often told that our accounts of reality aren’t correct. That the way you feel and the way you’re experiencing the world is somehow your fault, and if you want certain things you should feel bad for wanting those things.” We’re not talking about Alex, or Maddy, or Maid any more. Something bigger. “By proxy of standing up for Alex and standing up for Maddy… I was able to realise that I shouldn’t feel ashamed of certain wants or beliefs or feelings. And that it is literally still hard to say these things, because people are so conditioned and practised not to speak this way.”
She began to reflect on her own approach to relationships. “I’ve been trying to think lately, what allows certain people to not hurt themselves by letting people walk over them, but to take a bullet instead of being resentful and angry and hung up on it. I think that ability to love other people in such a big way comes from loving yourself in a big way. So I’m working on that.” Has she been walked over or treated badly in the past? “Yeah. And I’m really lucky now because I have really amazing people that have the best intentions. I’m really lucky. I’m not getting hurt very much. But you’re not always going to be around those safe, special people. You have to build up those skills and figure out how to navigate the world.”
On one side, she fully admits that she had a level of protection as “Andie McDowell’s daughter” within the industry, but on the other side, she’s really trying to act like she moved to New York as a teen and started modeling and it was all chaotic and messy and she was flying without a net. The AnOther piece even mentioned, in passing, that she was a débutante at Le Bal des Débutantes, the famous A-list Paris ball for rich girls. I mean, she’s all the things – she has enormous privilege and she’s a product of nepotism, and she’s a goofy, over-earnest young woman who works hard.
Cover and IG courtesy of AnOther.
