The Substance’s Margaret Qualley is getting the hang of being a movie star

NEW YORK – Margaret Qualley could finally breathe again.

“I’ve been working a lot,” she said over iced tea at Clark’s, a Brooklyn Heights diner near where she lives with her husband, Grammy-winning American music producer and frequent Taylor Swift collaborator Jack Antonoff. “I’m relishing these little lull moments.”

Qualley, 29, has more than earned a break.

After making a striking debut 10 years ago in the HBO series The Leftovers (2014 to 2017), the American actress appeared in Once Upon A Time... In Hollywood (2019), followed by Emmy-nominated performances in Fosse/Verdon (2019) and the Netflix miniseries Maid (2021).

In the past year, she starred in Poor Things (2023), Drive-Away Dolls (2024) and Kinds Of Kindness (2024), and had just returned from shooting three back-to-back movies – Ethan Coen and Tricia Cooke’s Honey Don’t!, John Patton Ford’s Huntington and Richard Linklater’s Blue Moon.

Moviegoers will next see her in The Substance, a film that is somehow a departure from all of the above and one she acknowledged was uniquely challenging.

Written and directed by Coralie Fargeat, and opening in Singapore cinemas on Sept 26, it is a body-horror bloodbath in which American actress Demi Moore plays Elisabeth Sparkle, an actress who, attempting to recapture her fading youth, injects herself with a mysterious serum.

The result is Sue (Qualley), a younger, taller, “perfect” woman who emerges fully formed from Elisabeth’s body. The two of them must trade places every week, with the one who is off-duty kept nourished by IV bags of potions.

But soon enough, Sue develops a taste for her new world and does not want to be put on ice when it is her turn to hibernate.

Qualley was in Panama, shooting Claire Denis’ Stars At Noon (2022), when she read The Substance’s script, and was drawn to the prospect of playing a character who seemed “really far from me”, she said.

“It was just very singular, this inverted fairy-tale horror story,” she said. “I had a feeling that it was going to be special.”

The Substance – rated M18 in Singapore – was shot mostly in Paris and won for best screenplay at the 2024 Cannes Film Festival.

Along the way, it ignited debates about whether its extravagant gore and nudity were outrageous fun or a kind of torture porn aimed at the ageing.

Moore, 61, who read the script at her agent’s insistence before she knew any details, was fascinated by the film’s unusual subject matter, she said in a video call from Los Angeles.

“This could either work or it could be a disaster,” she recalled thinking. “But if it works, it could have such a cultural impact.”

The physical similarities between Qualley and Moore were important, but so were their differences.

“I was thinking about when I was younger, going: Why didn’t I end up with blue eyes? And Margaret has blue eyes. And why didn’t I end up taller? And Margaret is taller,” Moore said. “I just thought there’s something kind of intriguing about that idea.”

The two women had to spend a lot of time together on a cold tile floor. During one scene, as the cameras were preparing to roll, Moore laughed uncontrollably when Qualley had to fall on top of her. They were both naked.

“‘Thank god we like each other, or this would be really awkward,’” she remembered Qualley saying.

“This was not going to be like I was going to be shot and lit to be my most glamorous,” Moore added. “But in a weird way, there was something kind of liberating about that. And I said to Margaret at one point, ‘I feel like I would feel much more pressure if I was having to be the one who was seen as perfect.’”

Moore – a member of the 1980s Brat Pack who rocketed to fame in movies such as St Elmo’s Fire (1985), Ghost (1990) and Indecent Proposal (1993) – found Qualley to be a focused and fearless co-star.

“She has an incredible confidence,” Moore said. “I don’t feel like I see in her the markings of, let’s say, what I experienced when I was younger, which was too much value being placed on the external.”

Qualley – born to actress Andie MacDowell (who co-starred with Moore in St Elmo’s Fire) and Paul Qualley, a former model who is now a rancher and homebuilder – adds: “It really points out how hard it is for humans to love themselves and how we end up hurting one another because of our own self-hatred.

“But I also never could have prepared myself for the mind-(expletive) of making it. I think everyone involved had to enter the eye of the storm.”

After completing The Substance, Drive-Away Dolls and Kinds Of Kindness, she took time off to unwind and to plan her wedding to Antonoff, 40.

They had first met at a friend’s birthday party and then a couple of years later at a rooftop party at Electric Lady, a recording studio. This time, it stuck.

They were married on Long Beach Island, New Jersey, in August 2023.

Swift – Antonoff has worked on her last 11 albums – was a guest. American singer-songwriter Lana Del Rey performed her song Margaret (2023), which she had composed as a gift for Antonoff.

“I met the love of my life and got to marry him,” Qualley said, adding, “I feel like I’m a little kid for the first time in my life. I’m totally being taken care of in the way I’ve always dreamt of being taken care of.”

She added: “Hopefully, I’ve given him that feeling too. I feel like I can dream bigger because of him and live bigger because of him.”

Qualley tends to choose a project based on the person making it, “and I like working with people who know a lot more than I do”, she said.

“I’m just trying to move through life like water in a river and stay agile and move around the rocks, be a part of something greater than yourself,” she added. “Just continue to be as true to myself in the moment as I can.”

“I feel like I’m changing so much all of the time every day,” Qualley said of her momentum, both in her career and personally. “I’m kind of continuously on this ride of ‘Oh, now I get it.’” NYTIMES