In true Saturn return fashion, the performance would also lead her back to her first love of dance in what Qualley calls a “wild, full circle” moment, performing a choreographed number onstage at the Oscars in front of her Hollywood peers and 19.7 million viewers at home. “It was nuts because Mandy Moore — the choreographer, not Mandy Moore the actress — is somebody who [growing up] I would drive three hours to Atlanta to take her class and I used to dance my little ass off trying to get her attention so that she'd bring me up on stage,” she explains, still in disbelief at the cosmic synchronicity of it all. “Then, cut to 20 years later, I finally got her attention and it was just so surreal and so fucking fun.”
Qualley’s preparation for the role of Sue was largely physical. “I think my butt got more screen time than my face,” she jokes. She worked with a trainer and “did a lot of yoga to try to get my body to be as symmetrical as possible, to feel almost newborn.” (Appropriate, given her character crawls out of Moore’s splitting spine, gushing blood like a twisted enactment of childbirth.) Psychologically, Qualley had to prepare herself to “lean into the hypersexualisation gaze,” rather than resist it, for the first time in her life. What helped her embody the overt eroticism of the role was the frankness with which the film addresses it—Sue may be the epitome of our unattainable beauty standards, but she’s there to satirise them. “It’s a part of a larger story,” she explains. “It’s okay if you hate me. In fact, you’re meant to.”
The box office is banking on us not hating Qualley at all. Hollywood clearly loves her, in fact, as she has four films coming out in 2025, and a fifth in production. This year, she plays a minor role in Adam Sandler’s Happy Gilmore 2, stars opposite Ethan Hawke in Richard Linklater’s forthcoming Lorenz Hart biopic Blue Moon, and appears in the upcoming thriller Huntington with Glen Powell and Ed Harris. Following last year’s Drive-Away Dolls, she’s also once again teamed up with director Ethan Coen and writer Tricia Cooke on Honey Don’t! coming out later this year. The film follows Qualley as the titular Honey, a gay private detective investigating a questionable church led by Chris Evans.
For the role, Qualley had to dial back her “natural Scooby-Doo” inclinations “to be a little more suave than I am, more mysterious. I tend to want to diffuse things before they even happen. [Whereas] Honey, she’s like honey — she’s skillful, she’s smooth, she is slipping in and out undetected.” And, of course, she’s getting herself in plenty of sticky situations along the way. But she jokes that beyond taming her penchant for conflict-avoidance, there wasn’t a whole lot of preparation necessary for the part as, “No girl needs to be taught how to be a detective. Women know what's happening even when they don't know what's happening. I remember in my early twenties, especially, my investigative skills on Instagram were really out of control. It's a combination of tools, craft, and gut instinct.”
She adds that getting to work with Cohen and his wife Cooke on these two films has been “unlike anything else I've ever known. They respect and love each other so much. I love the world that they're living in.” She also hopes it’s a world she’ll get to return to one more time as Honey Don’t! is the second installment of what’s meant to be a lesbian B-movie trilogy. “I have not read a script and I haven't been contacted,” she warns. “But let the record show that if I'm not in [the third film], I will be offended and I will be upset.”
She insists it’s not just ambition that drives her. “I remember my mom saying when I was little, always swim with swimmers that are faster than you. I’ve always been trying to work with people who are better than me so I can get better. There’s so much to learn,” she explains. “And I love being on set. I love the group project of it. You get real bonding.”
Being on set reminds her of visiting Montana with family every winter, when “my mom would take us on these long-ass hikes in the snow. I fucking hated it and my sister hated it, but we would have the best time because we were so miserable. We’d just be playing the most ridiculous games or planning our wedding or what the perfect horse would look like. You end up becoming silly, and I think that working towards something, going through challenges with other people, is so integral to the human experience. Without that, I’ll find my own problems. So the beautiful ‘problem’ that is a movie is very attractive to me.”
One problem she hasn’t been able to solve just yet? How to get cast in more romantic and comedic roles. “There’s your headline: Margaret Wants to Do Comedies—Help,” she says with a big laugh, adding, “I’d love to do something like Lucille Ball.”
She famously already stars in a real-life romantic comedy of her own making. In 2023, Qualley married music powerhouse and “love of my life” Jack Antonoff, in a wedding attended by the most famous people in the world, from Taylor Swift to Lana Del Rey. The couple met at a friend’s birthday party two years prior, where Qualley says she knew from the moment she saw Antonoff that she was going to marry him—a chance encounter now immortalised in a Lana Del Rey song, produced by Antonoff, that bears her name.
One of the reasons she hasn’t sought more lighthearted parts until now is that, in the past, when she first started acting, she gravitated towards dark and gritty cult classics. “I was a little freak,” she laughs. “I loved Basketball Diaries, Requiem for a Dream, Kramer vs. Kramer, Girl, Interrupted—those were the movies that inspired me. And I think they informed my choices for the next 10 years. That, in addition to always looking to work with the best director I could possibly work with. A lot of times those directors are making things that are more obscure and arty.”
These days, “I’d love nothing more than to do something like The Notebook or Titanic, or something in Nancy Meyers’ world. I guess I don’t have as much teenage angst,” she laughs. “Those are the movies that I enjoy watching the most now, too. I’m looking for something that I would both enjoy doing and enjoy watching. I think that latter part is important, and I haven’t thought about that until lately.”
Qualley says finding her husband is one of the major motivations behind this sudden bout of self-reflection. She spent so much of her 20s trying to mold herself into whatever her partners wanted her to be. “You find out what real love is, then you get to meet yourself,” she explains.“I feel like I have been so actively looking for [Jack] my whole life that, now that I’ve found him, I oddly have the ability to focus more, dream bigger. I think everyone has different needs and desires and, for me, love was just priority number one. I spent my 20s looking in all the wrong places, and now that I have him, the world has become bigger and brighter.”
She adds with a cheeky smile, “I just want to try to enjoy my life as much as I can and experience it. Remember, it’s not a marathon.”