While Margaret Qualley has been acting consistently since her early 20s, I really never clocked her as a burgeoning star until 2019’s Fosse/Verdon. She played Bob Fosse’s girlfriend and protege Ann Reinking, and she stole several scenes from Sam Rockwell and Michelle Williams, both of whom were doing some of their career-best work. Since then, Margaret’s star has risen to a crazy level. She’s now 30 years old and married to Jack Antonoff, and she’s consistently doing interesting work and working with cool directors. Her 2025 films include: Honey Don’t (by Ethan Coen and Tricia Cooke), Blue Moon, Huntington and Happy Gilmore 2. To promote all of those projects, Margaret covers the latest issue of Cosmopolitan. Some highlights from her interview:

Her dance background: “I moved to New York City at 16, when I got into a summer program at the American Ballet Theatre. Although I didn’t watch Dance Moms, that was very much the world I grew up in. But I realized I was just not good enough to be a dancer, and I’ll never be perfect at it. And if I’m not going to be the best, I don’t think it’s worth pursuing. I got a modeling job and was able to pay my rent. And I was like, “I could just stay here.” I sent my mom a long email: “Found a school. Got a job. What do you think?” She got it, but then I was 16 years old, alone in the city. It felt terrifying. Other kids were going home to their parents and their tutors, and I was at Paris Fashion Week with a chemistry or algebra textbook for a class that I was failing. I didn’t have any friends. I didn’t know anyone in the city. If a guy got on the elevator, I would get off.”

Falling for Jack Antonoff: “Falling in love with Jack was the biggest feeling I’ve ever felt. We met right as COVID was ending, at the first party I’d been to. We saw each other on a roof, and we just started talking and never stopped. We went on a series of walks throughout the city that summer.

Who said ‘ILY’ first? “He did, obviously. I’m very old-school about stuff like this. I would never put myself out there first. I never text twice. I mean, now we’re married and I can text him anything at any time. We’re always having a conversation; he’s like my human diary. But before we were together, at the beginning, I would always follow Southern girl etiquette.

Searching for a healthy love: “Have you ever read bell hooks’s All About Love? I read it after an intense, bad relationship. And I was like, “Oh, right. This thing that we’ve been sold is love…that’s not love.” Someone who loves you wouldn’t try to hurt you. And I think that because we’re lonely and seeking, we try to tell a story to ourselves that justifies people’s actions, when the reality is that real love isn’t painful in that way. [Healthy love feels] like there’s always a ground below you. You can’t fall very far because you’re going to be caught. But love is also hard. It’s why I feel inspired to make movies about love, whether it’s platonic or romantic or whatever. The kind of thing I would be proud to show my kids one day.

She wants kids: “I want kids. I’m not there this second—I know there’s a lot of stuff I don’t know—but I’ve always wanted kids. Even as a little kid, I would imagine having babies.

She meditates: “I meditate every day, twice a day, and I feel very in touch with the same person that I was when I was 4 or 9, you know? But as a woman, I feel like, “How much of this is me?” Like 98 percent is what the world puts on you—it’s everyone else’s baggage.

On The Substance: “The Substance was like entering the eye of the storm. It was like dealing with all of my sh-t, my mom’s sh-t, generations of trauma. It was a nightmare, being this idyllic, youthful fembot. No one thinks of themselves like that. The movie is not a good touchstone for what femininity is—it is quite masculine in a lot of ways. The thing I’ll take home with me, for sure, is Demi Moore. She’s such a special person. She’s strong and she’s wise, but she’s also incredibly soft and porous.

On her gay fanbase: “I love the gays, thank you.”

Why she tries not to constantly check her phone: “Cell phones are like cigarettes. I’m a big fan of airplane mode. Because opening your phone is also like going to work, you know? I don’t have any apps on my phone except Uber, texting, and Maps. And that’s nice, because then it’s like if I’m at the grocery store, I don’t just pull out my phone. I’m just there, listening to people’s conversations. And I feel more immersed in my life. I have another phone at home that doesn’t have cell phone service—it just has Wi-Fi, and I can look at Instagram. We are all definitely too plugged in.”

[From Cosmopolitan]

I love her reference to “Southern girl etiquette” when it came to texting the guy she was dating. But her story keeps changing! I remember reading a different interview where she described knowing right away that Jack was The One, and she kept sending him photos of babies and writing “what do you think?” It doesn’t really matter now – when you know you know, and I think they both knew right away. As for The Substance… I hated that movie, and she’s absolutely right that the story was “quite masculine in a lot of ways.” They kept trying to say that it had this powerful feminist message, but it did not. It was a story about the exploitation of women, and the film itself was exploitative.

Photos courtesy of Avalon Red, Cover Images. Cover courtesy of Cosmo.