THE VOICES ISSUE MARGARET in Motion

MARGARET QUALLEY is having a BANNER YEAR. She just got MARRIED. She has a clutch of FILMS in the can. She's entering a NEW PHASE in HER LIFE and CAREER. But she'll never stop DANCING to the song in her head.

- STEPHEN MOOALLEM

We're not painting ceramic mugs. We're not scaling a climbing wall as a metaphor for her ascent in Hollywood or taking dance lessons to explore the way she has found her footing as a performer either-though she loves to dance and does it anywhere and anytime she can. Instead, Margaret Qualley and I are sitting in a corner booth in a restaurant off the lobby of a Greenwich Village hotel, talking about what it means to build a life-as an actor but also as a person at a time when so much about both of those projects seems to come swathed in an almost extravagant amount of uncertainty, surrounded by questions that are almost too big to contemplate. I will, though, find myself needing to mention Taylor Swift at least three times, all for material reasons.

It's mid-afternoon on a summer Friday, and the venue for our conversation, with its imported French decor, is quiet apart from the clanking of glasses and silverware as tables are set for the dinner rush. Qualley, who is 28, isn't wearing an enormous T-shirt or a vintage novelty hat, as has occasionally been her wont, but a white sundress, her wavy brown hair cropped into a chin-length bob. The location was chosen because her soon-to-be husband, Grammy-winning singer, songwriter, and superproducer Jack Antonoff, is working nearby at Electric Lady, the hallowed downtown recording facility made famous by Jimi Hendrix and more recently Antonoff, who has collaborated there with Taylor Swift and Lana Del Rey.