Margaret Qualley Manifested This Cover Story

Cosmopolitan

2 days ago

'I personally feel like I'm always having an epiphany,' says Margaret Qualley as she leads me along her 'special walk' on her 'special beach' by the small seaside building where she married her husband, music producer and Bleachers frontman Jack Antonoff.¹ We met up an hour ago at her 'special coffee shop,' and as the sun starts to set over the Jersey Shore, she instinctively picks up her dog, Smokey, to protect him from a wave.
It's hard to reconcile this version of Margaret—working through quiet revelations, doting on her favorite places in this sleepy pocket of the East Coast—with the Margaret who's one of the busiest women in Hollywood. The very morning of our interview, her movie Honey Don't!, the second installment in the Drive-Away Dolls lesbian trilogy from Ethan Coen and Tricia Cooke, is announced to premiere at the Cannes Film Festival.² Blue Moon, the Richard Linklater film she's in, is set to premiere this fall. She had recently finished working on Huntington, a dark comedy–thriller she leads alongside Glen Powell, and is currently starring in Happy Gilmore 2, the long-awaited sequel to Adam Sandler's cult golf comedy.
1. Margaret and Jack got married in August 2023 on Long Beach Island. TikTok highlights include appearances from Taylor Swift, Zoë Kravitz, Cara Delevingne, and Lana Del Rey. When I ask Margaret about the evening, she gushes, 'It was just so much fun. I got so drunk. I've never had that many espresso martinis in my life.'2. Clips of Margaret and her costar Aubrey Plaza holding each other on the Cannes red carpet would later go viral.
All four starring roles join more than a decade's worth of other projects in which Margaret explores the complications and contradictions that come with womanhood. It's a body of work that when studied altogether makes clear Margaret has been carefully curating her portfolio all along, building up her comedic timing and signature moves (her lip bite practically has its own fandom now). Most recently, she found herself crawling out of Demi Moore's spine in The Substance, but there's also been Maid, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, and Poor Things, all of which were nominated for prestigious awards.
Despite all she's accomplished—or maybe because of it—she is disarmingly open and curious on this special walk on her special beach. She's focused on how our conversation (and this magazine) might help others feel more at home in their bodies and, in turn, their relationships. 'I feel like I understand myself more every single day,' she explains. The kind of love we devote to ourselves and, in turn, our relationships with others is, she adds, 'the most profound thing in the world.'
It's a gift when an interview feels more like a deep conversation than a campaign, doubly so because Margaret and I both have platforms to champion. For her, it's the four new films; for me, as Cosmopolitan's editor-in-chief, it's this anniversary issue, marking six decades since legendary editor Helen Gurley Brown remade the brand to center honest conversations about love and sex. Margaret and I agree that while it may no longer be revolutionary to promote this kind of open discourse in 2025, the types of stories we tell (she through her acting; me through my editing) are still necessary to challenge and help form people's beliefs in meaningful ways. So that all of us can have epiphanies from time to time and find the things that feel uniquely ours.
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.
I lived all of my 20s out of a suitcase, without any furniture. I had a mattress on the floor. And I became financially independent by the time I was 18, so I was super frugal, too.
An extra-nice leather jacket…but I never wore it because I actually don't like leather jackets. I'm not cool enough to wear a leather jacket. It doesn't work for me, you know what I mean? I'm just not that girl.
Midway through my junior year of high school. I got a boyfriend then, too, and that relationship was super transformative. We were together for five or six years, and he had a good group of friends and a family that was super present. I ended up living with them—it was stabilizing for me. He also brought me to an acting class. We still talk today. He came to my wedding with his little brother.
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.³ 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.⁴
3. Margaret's sister, Rainey Qualley, takes full credit for this meet-cute: 'I was recording at Electric Lady, where Jack Antonoff works,' she explains. 'We'd heard rumors he was looking for forever love. So when there was a small party on the roof and I had a bit too much to drink, I proceeded to tell Jack that he needed to date my sister!'
4. According to Margaret, 'Washington Square Park is the best place to fall in love.'
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.
In every other relationship I've ever been in, I still felt really lonely because I wasn't with my person, and it's like I was seeking something. I don't feel like that anymore. Jack makes me feel safe and comfortable.
I spent so many years trying to be someone's perfect girl, and that girl changed over and over again. But I can't lie to Jack. I can't be that for him—he'd see through it. So I just have to be myself. He's been the person I've pictured my whole life. And I'm not even saying that metaphorically. My first crush was Adam Sandler in Happy Gilmore and Big Daddy, and I've been looking for that essence my whole life. I'm like, 'That's Jack.'
Most of my girlfriends, most women I know, have had some version of an abusive relationship. Plus, we're kind of all trained to be pitted against each other, as women. It's just such bullshit, you know? I put everything I had into Maid, even casting my real mom as my show mom. I hung out with the girl who played my daughter—her name's Rylea—every weekend for the entire shoot. I really believed in it, and I wanted it to feel as real as it possibly could. It was super intense. I learned that in moments like this, the way that women quietly support each other, in even the most micro ways, is just so beautiful.
5. In its first month on Netflix alone, Maid was watched more than 67 million times, and Margaret was nominated for a Primetime Emmy Award for her role.
I learned so much from Maid. Have you ever read bell hooks's All About Love?⁶ 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.
6. All About Love: New Visions, by bell hooks, was first published in 1999. It proposes that love and physical abuse cannot coexist.
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.
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.
I have, and it's iconic—she looks amazing. Ever since I was young, Cosmo has been the only magazine I've avidly read. I was this gangly thing that so badly wanted to be one of the girls with the spray tan and the blonde hair who played field hockey. I manifested this Cosmo cover.
I remember being on a plane with my sister, Rainey, and we'd gotten our hands on a Cosmo. We immediately flipped to the questionnaire, then to the sex-stories-gone-wrong and read the most salacious bits. I was reading this way before I'd had sex. I was a late bloomer.
I grew up in the South, and Cosmo was helpful in that it removed shame from sex. I realized that there's a world in which you can have fun and maybe not be so embarrassed about it all.
Rainey⁷ is my best friend in the world. I talk to her every day. She just had a baby, Bluebell. She is in California right now but will probably move to North Carolina, where we grew up and where my dad lives. We're both like, 'I want to be there more than in the city' these days. For the longest time, I found it so comforting to be in the middle of chaos. But now I'm 30, and I'm starting to chill out. It feels good to just be able to have some peace and drive to the grocery store.
7. Rainey's album Before Blue is due out later this year.
I've been in therapy since I was 16. In my early 20s, I had severe insomnia that got in the way of a lot. I would be awake until 9 in the morning and just begging for sleep. One of the first movies I did was The Nice Guys. It premiered at Cannes, and I didn't go to Cannes because I hadn't slept in four days and I felt like I wasn't going to survive.
I'm just getting to the place where I feel like I can stay in my own body instead of shape-shifting to be whatever whoever wants. But I'm still very consistently trying to strengthen my own point of view and feel myself on my feet and in my shoes. The biggest thing I've learned is that the sooner you allow yourself to feel whatever you're feeling, the better. What I know for certain is that I'm happier than I've ever been, by leaps and bounds. I know myself better, and I can enjoy my life.
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.
The Substance was like entering the eye of the storm. It was like dealing with all of my shit, my mom's shit, generations of trauma.⁹ 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.
8. Margaret was nominated for both a Golden Globe and a Critics Choice Award for this role.
9. When I reach out to Margaret's The Substance costar Demi Moore, she agrees. The movie, Demi says, brought her similar epiphanies: 'It cracked something open in me. It held a mirror to all the ways we're taught to split ourselves in two, the version we are and the version we think we need to be in order to be loved. Womanhood, to me now, is about integrating all of it—the shadow, the shine, the scars, the softness—and knowing that none of it needs to be erased to be enough.'
Oh my god! I love Demi, but I don't think we have sexual tension. I learned so much from her. She's become one of my dearest friends.
I love the gays, thank you.
10. Of her and Margaret's onscreen romance, Aubrey says, 'It's a soulmate kind of love. A dangerous love.' Of their real-life friendship, she tells me, 'It's rare to do a movie and leave with a lifelong friend. Margaret has helped me get through some of the hardest times of my life. We have each other's backs. I'll defend her to the end.
I trust any girl to be able to solve a fucking murder mystery with Instagram, to be honest. But my character is very confident and talkative. She's not a woman of few words. I think that sometimes I've made myself comfortable by knocking myself down. She's the opposite of that. She's in her power and smart and sexy.
She's a bit like a cool-guy player. I don't know why, but for some reason, I made my physicality kind of like Matty Healy. I tried to do it like Matty Healy would do it. I got to feel what it would be like to be a guy hitting on a girl.¹¹
11. Ethan Coen and Tricia Cooke wrote to me that what makes Margaret so special is that she 'doesn't second-guess herself or try to sell the audience some image of herself; she just comes to play.'
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.
The best sex comes from making sure you know your body and that your partner knows your body—so you can enjoy yourself.
(Cover Image) Versace dress Chanel High Jewelry rings. (Last Video) Courrèges bodysuit, Chanel High Jewelry jewelry.
Hair by Evanie Frausto for PRAVANA. Makeup by Romy Soleimani. Manicure by Yukie Miyakawa for Dior. Set design by Nicholas Des Jardins. Production by Dana Brockman at Viewfinders.
Shot on location at The Penthouse of 1 East 62nd Street, represented by Zina Raslan with the Gambino Group at Compass, and Classic Harbor Line.
(Video/loops) Director and writer: Alana O'Herlihy. DP: Forest Erwin. Edit and color: Amalia Irons.