The sexy gymnast from “The Substance” feels like a peasant dressed in Chanel

He met Margaret on a terrace. She was dressed in white and he thought: “I may be in trouble.””. Faced with visions of what a good life could be, he wondered if he should jump off the cliff or cheer up.

This is how Lana Del Rey narrates – the current American singer-songwriter with more glamor but less fame than Taylor Swift – the first meeting between his friend and producer Jack Antonoff and the woman he would end up marrying, Margaret Qualley. As Celestina, Lana leaks the possible wedding date towards the end of the song. Titled Margaret, the ballad is part of her latest album, Did You Know That There Is A Tunnel Under Ocean Blvd. An album that, worth the redundancy, was produced by Antonoff, the same one who accompanied the rise to stardom of singers like Taylor Swift and Lorde.

Margaret Qualley is the daughter of Andie MacDowell, a legendary actress of the nineties: remember his duet with Hugh Grant in Four weddings and a funeral (1994)? From her he received Scottish genetics. She was born in Montana (northwest of the USA) and spent her first years of life in a place that she describes as “a ranch”, completely away from television and the world of fame. His father, a rancher, who had once been a model. Andie and Paul separated when Margie was only 5 years old.

Since childhood he was interested in dancing -specifically ballet-, he had private teachers and participated in competitions. When her family moved to North Carolina, she began studying classical dance at the University of the Arts, and at sixteen she moved to New York to join the American Ballet Theatre.

Although her first anecdotes about dance classes date back to when she was two years old, when she started wearing the shoes that would deform her feet forever, she says she discovered that she only danced to be “the best,” that She spent her time injured and suffering. So, when her boyfriend at the time dragged her to an acting improvisation class, she discovered her true calling. Having abandoned the dancing career for which she had prepared her entire life, she worked for a time as a model so that her parents would let her continue living in New York.

He made his acting debut in 2013, with a minor role in the series Palo Alto, which was followed by a more prominent appearance in another series, The Leftovers (2014). In 2019 Tarantino sponsored her in his film Once Upon a Time In Hollywoodwith the role of a hippie from the Manson clan who tries to seduce Brad Pitt’s character.

In a gesture that could be classified as, at least, ironic, Tarantino surrounded Margaret with a cast of other daughters of stars such as Maya Hawke, daughter of Uma Thurman, and Rumer Willis, daughter of Demi Moore. But about her “nepobaby” status (daughter of an equally famous celebrity), Margaret doesn’t seem conflicted. Every time she is asked something about it, she responds that she is aware of her privileges and that it does not seem unfair to her to be classified as a daughter of nepotism.

Under that humble tone, something else seems to appear: the confidence, drawn in her smile, that she is good enough to transcend her mother’s shadow.

Among his acting highlights we can also name: Sanctuary (2022), where she plays a power-hungry dominatrix, and three films that came out this year: Drive Away Dollsa lesbian road movie, Kinds of Kindness (here Types of kindness), his second experience working with Yorgos Lanthimos, and The substance, the role with which he attracted the most attention to date. In most of them the erotic component of the characters played by Margaret has been highlighted, in one way or another.

He is currently 30 years old.

curly hair, subtly separated palettesstar-shaped earrings, prominent eyebrows, sweet eyes and a tight model body in a metallic pink bodysuit. Thus Margaret plays Sue, a hot fitness teacher, in Substance, the film by Coralie Fargeat that premiered in theaters on September 20 and which ended up placing her as the new Hollywood revelation.

Usually cataloged under the genre body horror, “body horror”, The substance tells the story of a Los Angeles television star played by Demi Moore who, after losing her aerobics program for being considered “too old,” buys a drug on the black market to create a younger version of herself: that is exactly the role of Margaret Qualley.

But both of them, she and that sexy and profane clone of “her best qualities” are the same person, alternating bodies and, as is predictable from minute zero, they end up fighting for prominence. Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde style.

The protagonist abuses the power of “substance” and her obsession with beauty and youth ends up turning her into a monstrous and deformed creature. A prosthetic suit that Margaret had to get into to film the last scenes of the film.

I would say later that being in there It felt like “a torture chamber”, that made him desperate to tear off that skin made of special effects – but, of course, that would have meant tearing off his own skin as well – and that they recorded until he had a panic attack.

The substancewhich won the Best Screenplay award at the Cannes Film Festival and is nominated for an Oscar several times, was so celebrated by her portrait of female suffering as criticized for the obviousness of the reflection it proposes and the literalness of its execution. With reasonable grounds: already in 1890 Oscar Wilde had written The Portrait of Dorian Grayan ode to cynicism and the eternal ideal of youth, and the film does not renew these ideas too much.

Rather, it takes care of infinitely reaffirming its initial postulate, alternating scenes in which the young version films its program and the old version sits in the apartment rotting and cooking tons of chicken. There is not much more that can be appreciated about the life of this it girl born from cloning or from that fallen star, beyond the fact that she hates herself for her old age. It could be a worthy heir to Death Becomes Her (1992), the camp classic in which Meryl Streep She buys eternal youth, but to compete for this position she lacks something essential: her predecessor’s sense of humor.

The effect produced by seeing Margaret moving to the rhythm of a lobotomizing song who repeats “pump it up” has less to do with the desire to overthrow the canon of female beauty than with running to some black market to buy the tons of poison necessary to become her.

After the film was released, Qualley would say that this type of sexual performance does not fit her, that the role pushed her beyond her “physical and emotional limits”and that he cried the first time he had to prepare the scene. I would also say that to embody that hegemonic fantasy turned into gore self-confidence he had to use a prosthetic bust.

Margaret He has already won two Emmy Awards.is the face of Chanel and is becoming one of the most talked about new actresses of her generation.

But in an interview with The Countrysays that retains a southern sensibility (she grew up in North Carolina) that prevents her from losing a certain innocence, that she still feels like a farm girl.

That when he had just arrived in New York he found an injured bird on the street and he put it in his coat to rescue it, but when he arrived at the door of the veterinarian he opened the coat and the bird flew away. That for her, Hollywood is a kind of fascinating secret fabric that terrifies her. On his Instagram account, intersperses videos of his horse and memories of his childhood as a peasant girl with photos in which she promotes her films.

This was the last novel that Truman Capote began to write while he was alive and it was published – unfinished and posthumously – in 1986. It begins with a quote from the words of an eight-year-old girl in a school magazine: “If I could do what I wanted, I would go to the center of the earth, our planet, and look for uranium, rubies and gold. I would try to find Perfect Monsters. Then I would go live in the country.”

PB Jones, the character that Capote used to narrate the world of the New York jet set of the sixties to which, as an outsider, he had gained entry – and which, paradoxically, ended up expelling him from there -, assures that he knows what it feels like to embark on a journey towards the center of the earth, and that has also known Perfect Monsters. They are the writers, editors, socialites and actresses who adopted the author as a star in their social circuits. They are the divas who became his swans – as he called them – and who, after the publication of the first chapters of this novel in the magazine Esquire, They punished him by banishing him from the aristocracy for having revealed their intimacies.

The opposite path can be found in Margaret’s life: Born in the countryside, she had to move to the city to go out to meet the monsters of flesh and prosthetics. If we understand Hollywood or New York as “the center of the earth”, right now Margaret must also be finding rubies and uranium. The rest of the story remains to be seen.