MARGARET
QUALLEY

Margaret Qualley was born in Kalispell, Montana, on 23 October 1994. Her television career includes The Leftovers, which ran from 2014 to 2017, followed by Fosse/Verdon and Maid. Moving between an ensemble and a central role gives her work different relationships to the audience: sometimes a character is one part of a larger mystery, and sometimes the viewer stays close to her decisions.

Her Ann Reinking in Fosse/Verdon earned a supporting-actress Emmy nomination in 2019. Playing Alex in Maid brought a lead-actress Emmy nomination in 2022, as well as a Golden Globe nomination that year. The distinction between these categories also marks a change in dramatic responsibility: a performance can illuminate someone else’s story or carry the viewer’s attention through its centre.

Her films include Once Upon a Time in Hollywood (2019), My Salinger Year, and Yorgos Lanthimos’ Poor Things (2023) and Kinds of Kindness (2024). This range makes it useful to approach each performance through the film’s own rules. A natural-seeming exchange and an intentionally strange gesture can serve very different kinds of fictional world.

In Coralie Fargeat’s The Substance (2024), she plays Sue opposite Demi Moore’s Elisabeth Sparkle; the role brought a supporting-actress Golden Globe nomination in 2025. FLM.RED’s reading focuses on the pressure to present a convincing image. Comparing this with her other work raises a question about performance itself: what is a character trying to show, and what becomes visible despite that effort?