![]() ![]() And I was like” – Qualley gurns and affects a deep voice – “look how long my fingers are.”Įven if it’s difficult to accept for a moment that anyone could ever see Qualley as an ugly sister – she is possessed of the sort of luminous beauty that has booked her Chanel and Kenzo campaigns – she is such a funny and self-deprecating raconteur that it’s possible to suspend disbelief. I grew up in a time when it was, like, Uggs and Juicy Couture, and denim miniskirts, blonde hair and boobs. “I was so annoying, and passionate, and gangly.” By contrast her sister was “conventionally beautiful in her own whimsical and incredible way. “I was a vegetarian who was selling recycled global-warming bracelets for charity and sifting through the trash bins, being like, ‘You didn’t recycle this,’ and putting up pictures of cows being slaughtered,” she laughs. Later she grew into what we would now call a social justice warrior, only this was in the early Noughties, when activism was uncool. She would think that inanimate objects like pillows and chairs had feelings and was obsessed with making sure that her socks were neat and unwrinkled. Qualley was a strange, terminally uncool child. “My mom was the only actor in Asheville,” Qualley says, “so it makes you a bit more on display, and people are interested when there’s nothing really interesting going on.” Growing up in a small town had its blessings – Qualley was removed from the neuroses and competitiveness of the LA scene – but also downsides. Her parents divorced amicably when she was five and moved to Asheville, North Carolina, where Qualley and her siblings Rainey and Justin split their time between their parents’ houses. She was born in Montana to the actor and model Andie MacDowell and the model-turned-property contractor Paul Qualley. “The messier you are, the more mistakes you make, the more vulnerable you are, the better it is” – Margaret Qualley “You’re supposed to take up all the space and make all the mistakes, and you’re supposed to do the thing you feel. ![]() ![]() “You forget that you’re supposed to be messy,” she says. She did indeed loll her tongue at Pitt in the next take, and it became one of the stand-out moments of a stand-out film, earning Qualley rave reviews for what might have been, in the hands of another actor, a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it role. “I was blown away.” And with that, Tarantino gave Qualley permission to lean into the sheer weirdness of her role. He asked Qualley: was there something you wanted to do in that scene that you didn’t do? “How did he fucking know that?” Qualley wonders. What the fuck am I doing? I better just obey.”Īfterwards Tarantino beckoned her over. “Who am I to take up that space? This is my first day on the job, this is Brad Pitt and Tarantino. “I thought, I better not do that,” she recalls. Qualley thought about it but ruled it out. A half-leering, half-promiscuous gesture. Pussycat would do something off-key in this situation, Qualley just knew it. She’s all uncontrolled id in denim cut-offs and a halter top. She does what she wants and thinks social norms are a drag. Pussycat is a louche, free-loving, hitch-hiking hippy chick with LSD-dipped cigarettes in her back pocket. The then 23-year-old Qualley was nervous, of course, and focused on getting through the scene without flubbing her lines in front of her co-star Pitt, who was playing languorous stuntman Cliff Booth.īut Qualley had this urge. Dogs prowled the perimeter: Tarantino was insistent they be visible in every shot, to approximate the rangy, pseudo-beatnik vibe of life in a cult. It was the first day of filming at a ranch in the Simi Valley, a stand-in for Spahn Ranch, where Manson infamously devised the gruesome Tate-LaBianca murders that, as Joan Didion famously wrote in The White Album, brought an end to the Sixties. (“He’s all the things you want him to be,” she says.) Qualley had never dreamed she’d be asked to be in anything so prestigious, or share screen time with Brad Pitt. It was only a minor role: that of Pussycat, a fictionalised member of Charles Manson’s cult, the Family. In 2018, Qualley was on the biggest production of her life, Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time. It doesn’t always come easily to the actor. Margaret Qualley is learning how to trust herself. ![]() This article is taken from the Spring/Summer 2022 issue of AnOther Magazine : ![]()
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