Margaret Qualley In Love

The 30-year-old award-winning actor manifested this.

- WILLA BENNETT

“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 front-man Jack Antonoff.

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.

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.