English translation below.

A Woman Never Still
Well on her trajectory along a meteoric rise, Margaret Qualley is a woman going places. Like catching lightning in a bottle, photographer Kate Bellm captures the actress in her signature spirit of playful, electric elegance.

Margaret Qualley is perpetually in motion. As we FaceTime on a sweltering Sunday afternoon from the Paris apartment she is staying in, the actress bounds from room to room. A bouncy ball of energy, she stops only to call out to her fiancé, music producer Jack Antonoff, in the next room to confirm that the Matthew McConaughey romantic comedy they were watching the night before, was, indeed, Failure To Launch. Antonoff, a collaborator with the likes of Taylor Swift, Lana del Rey and Lorde, has had his sister in town and together, the three have spent the day walking around Paris. It is a rare day off for Qualley, who is 20 weeks into a 23-week shooting schedule for The Substance directed by Coralie Fargeat, in which she stars alongside Demi Moore. Recently, she’s been doing double duty, ricocheting back and forth across the Atlantic to New York to audition and rehearse for the new Ethan Cohen road trip comedy she is currently filming opposite Geraldine Viswanathan on weekends, back on set in Paris on Mondays.

Even when seated, bow-legged, the palms of her feet touching, in a posture that is both childlike yet serene – a quality that could be considered something of a signature for the 27-year-old actress – Qualley often explodes in spontaneous giggles, Disney-like doe eyes outlined in ebullient expression, her fuzzy caterpillar eyebrows wiggling in endearing, conspiratorial joy.

Qualley doesn’t simply move in her own vacuum, she is moving, actively inspiring emotion. Within moments of meeting, she has me in eye-watering hysterics with her self-deprecating humor and off-the-wall, disarming warmth, making fun of her dressed-down outfit: hair in a top knot, a simple yellow zip-up sweater with a white undershirt, denim shorts and white socks - no shoes. 

On screen, she effervesces, effectively stealing the spotlight from industry titans like Brad Pitt with whom she starred alongside in Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon A Time In Hollywood in 2019 as a stray Manson Family hippie; opposite Sigourney Weaver in 2020’s My Salinger Year as a college graduate working for Weaver’s demanding literary agent of the reclusive author, JD Salinger or with Michelle Williams and Sam Rockwell in 2019’s Fosse/Verdon. There's her heart-wrenching, Emmy, SAG and Golden Globe-nominated turn as Alex in Maid, a young mother navigating a broken social system after fleeing an abusive relationship. (Qualley’s real-life mother, Andie Macdowell, played her on-screen mother for the Netflix series). In her early body of work, she won over audiences as a relative unknown as the frenetic, slightly deranged dancer in Spike Jonze’s Cannes Lion award-winning film short for Kenzo World perfume, a four-minute clip through which Qualley dances haphazardly, cries, winks, pulsates – not to mention, shoots lasers from her fingers - and spasms through in a quirky, untameable force. 

Amidst the fizzy energy, Qualley remains grounded. Earthy and unmistakably girl-next-door in demeanor, she is effusive about family members, minds her manners, (responding to the odd question with ‘Yes ma’am’) and drops her G’s from time to time, (“I love chatting, sittin’ down and chattin’ for a long time,”). Her favorite thing to do is to be with the people she loves. She enjoys simple pleasures like her dad’s shrimp pasta and pancakes (her death row meal, to be finished with “a big thing of mint chocolate chip ice cream”).

Despite being the daughter of actress Andie Macdowell (of Four Weddings And A Funeral fame) and rancher and former model, Paul Qualley, her childhood was much like any other. “Going to [yogurt chain] TCBY and the movie theater with my friends but like, sitting outside of the parking lot, going to the mall on the weekends.” Though she wasn’t one of those teenagers with childhood crushes plastered to the walls, (she only began hanging photos when she left home to go to ballet boarding school, even then they were of her family,) she had a formidable rock collection that she lugged from childhood home to boarding school to apartment through the years, before eventually burying them in the dirt in Washington Square Park, New York, when the logistics became too challenging.

Born in Montana, Qualley and her older siblings, real estate agent Justin and musician Rainey, spent their early years on a ranch, before moving to North Carolina when she was four. She notes her happiest moments as a kid sat outside her sister’s room, waiting “for her to pay attention to me”. In her youth, she trained as a ballerina, attending lessons for hours at a time after school. “I was a serious dance competition girl: NASCAR, Honey Booboo - rhinestones everywhere!” she exclaims. At 14, she boarded at the North Carolina School of the Arts, where she studied dance and earnt an apprenticeship at the American Ballet Theatre. At 16, she decided dancing was no longer for her, and moved to New York, alone, where she began modeling, (appearing on the runways of Alberta Ferretti, Valentino and Chanel, for whom she is a house ambassador) and was soon cast in Gia Coppola’s 2013 film Palo Alto with James Franco, effectively launching her acting career.

Fast forward through her aforementioned scene-stealing filmography to 2022, a year that will see two major releases for the actress as she works on a few more in the pipeline. The first, Sanctuary, directed by Zachary Wigon, premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival in September. Sitting somewhere between thriller, black comedy and psychological study, the film rolls out in a claustrophobic series of spaces - hotel room to corridor and back again - almost like a play, and sees Qualley star as Rebecca, a dominatrix hired by Hal (played by Christopher Abbott, perhaps best known for his turn in HBO’s GIRLS). A series of increasingly revealing interactions  see the two characters engaged in a tug-of-war of control. The layers of the game are written in the micro nuances in Qualley’s face, particularly in the bait-and-switch moments that she hints at, (or does she?).

The second, Stars At Noon directed by Claire Denis, is based on the novel of the same name by Denis Johnson. The film, though filmed in Panama, is set during the Nicaraguan revolution and sees Qualley’s Trish, an American journalist, fall for Joe Alwyn’s Daniel, an enigmatic Englishman who could provide Trish with a means of escape. The film was selected to compete for the Palme d’Or at the 2022 Cannes Festival and was the co-winner of the prestigious Grand Prix, set to be released in October.

“I’m not ever too far away from that feeling,” Qualley describes of the “fluttery, nervous” emotion of being on set, just as she had on her very first job. “It really just invigorates your passion and your nerves, and you feel like a kid going to school for the first day. I don’t ever want to be disingenuous, because that’s annoying, but there are big moments where it’s like, ‘This is cool, this is really exciting, and I can’t pretend that it’s not!’”

For her Vogue shoot, Qualley was captured by British photographer, Kate Bellm, known for her dreamy, languorous photographs often capturing Eden-like settings and underwater worlds through which her subjects swim. “It was great working with her,” says Qualley. “I really wanted to do one of those big underwater shoots that she does because they are super cool. I’ve always wanted to do an underwater scene in a movie, I just find it very exciting. Like, the last hour [on the Vogue shoot] I was swimming around and I was wearing a Chanel outfit in the water – like it was a Chanel couture top and I was swimming around in it and I was like, ‘What is happening?! This is crazy!’”

 As we wind down our call, I bring up a question that Hal asks Rebecca in Sanctuary. ‘Who did you want to be when you were young and when do you feel that way now?’ I pose the question to Qualley now, at ease and out of character. “I think I’m trying to be the person I was when I was young, in the sense that the closer I can get to my kid self, the better. Because we all kind of learn what’s wrong with us. We learn that this isn’t cool or that isn’t ok: the fact that you might be weird, the way that you look while you’re doing this is strange, boys don’t like this, behave, etcetera. I think unlearning all of the stuff that we did in order to mask who we are and still fit into society, as long as it’s coming from a well-intentioned place, is kind of the goal. And getting back to that place of being able to play and do things without worrying how it might look or seem and just being truly comfortable in your own skin is the ideal.”