Margaret Qualley

Margaret Qualley was born on December 23, 1994, in Kalispell, Montana, and grew up partly in Asheville, North Carolina. She is the daughter of model and actor Andie MacDowell and former model Paul Qualley. Before acting, Qualley trained as a dancer. At fourteen, she moved to New York City to study ballet and attended the American Ballet Theatre's summer program. She later left ballet and enrolled at the North Carolina School of the Arts, choosing acting as her principal profession.

Her first screen appearance came in Gia Coppola's 2013 film Palo Alto, where she played Raquel alongside Emma Roberts. In 2014, she joined HBO's The Leftovers as Jill Garvey, the rebellious teenage daughter of Justin Theroux's character, Kevin Garvey. The series, created by Damon Lindelof and Tom Perrotta, ran for three seasons and established Qualley as a performer capable of conveying guardedness, anger, and grief. She also appeared in the Netflix drama series The Get Down and in the 2017 film Novitiate, portraying Sister Cathleen, a young woman entering a convent during the reforms of the Second Vatican Council.

Qualley's collaborations with prominent filmmakers expanded her profile. In Quentin Tarantino's Once Upon a Time... in Hollywood (2019), she played Pussycat, a member of the Manson Family who encounters Leonardo DiCaprio's television actor, Rick Dalton. The same year, she appeared in Fosse/Verdon as Ann Reinking, the dancer and actor associated with choreographer Bob Fosse. In 2020, she starred in the experimental drama My Salinger Year, directed by Philippe Falardeau, as Joanna Rakoff, an aspiring writer working for a literary agency that handles J. D. Salinger's correspondence.

Her most prominent television role came with Maid, a 2021 Netflix limited series inspired by Stephanie Land's memoir Maid: Hard Work, Low Pay, and a Mother's Will to Survive. Qualley played Alex, a young mother who leaves an abusive relationship and supports her daughter through domestic cleaning jobs and public assistance. The performance earned her nominations for a Primetime Emmy Award and a Golden Globe. Andie MacDowell played Alex's mother, Paula, making their real-life relationship part of the series' central family dynamic.

Qualley continued choosing projects. She starred opposite Christopher Abbott in Sanctuary (2022), a drama directed by Zachary Wigon. In Claire Denis's Stars at Noon (2022), she played journalist Trish, who becomes entangled with a businessman in Nicaragua. She appeared in Yorgos Lanthimos's Kinds of Kindness and Coralie Fargeat's The Substance, released in 2024.