The star of “The Substance” says her marriage to Jack Antonoff has helped boost her confidence.

Margaret Qualley was scared women would hate her when she started acting: ‘I was just overwhelmed’

The star of "The Substance" says her marriage to Jack Antonoff has helped boost her confidence.

By Raechal Shewfelt

Raechal Shewfelt

Raechal Shewfelt is a writer at **. She has been working at EW since 2024. Her work has previously appeared on Yahoo and in American *Journalism Review* and *The Shreveport Times*.

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February 13, 2026 12:16 a.m. ET

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Margaret Qualley attends Paris Fashion Week on Jan. 27. Credit:

Aurore Marechal/Getty

Margaret Qualley says embarking on an acting career wasn't easy for her.

Though she had already been working as a model, the pressure was a lot to handle in her late teens and early 20s, *The Substance* actress, who's the daughter of actress-model Andie McDowell and former model Paul Qualley, explained to *Vanity Fair* in a story published Feb. 12.

"I started working so young, and when I first started acting, I was just overwhelmed," said Qualley, whose early work includes HBO drama *The Leftovers*, beginning in 2014, and a part in 2016 action comedy *The Nice Guys*, alongside Ryan Gosling and Russell Crowe.

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She continued, "I felt like if I was fully myself, women would hate me and men would hurt me. And so that took away some of the tools that come with being a woman because I was scared. Gradually, now that I feel like I have more control of my life, I can kind of lean more into the sensual and the feminine."

Still, she noted, she's tough on herself, being both "supercompetitive" and "very driven."

Margaret Qualley plays Elizabeth Weiland in 'Blue Moon'.

Sabrina Lantos/Courtesy of Sony Pictures Classics

The 31-year-old admitted that she's made bad moves, mistakes even, in her acting career.

"When I say mistakes," she clarified, "I don't mean it was the wrong thing, I mean I wouldn't do it again."

Qualley also explained that her relationship with husband Jack Antonoff, whom she married in 2023, has helped her to not shy away from being herself, regardless of what others think.

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"Jack has helped me for sure, because he has made me feel more confident to explore all the parts of myself," Qualley said. "But I'm also thinking about Mother Earth and the divine feminine and surrender. Those are the things I'm trying to lean into, that moment in my life."

She has also gained at least one friend through her relationship with Antonoff: Taylor Swift, whose music he's produced for more than a decade.**

When it comes to acting, Qualley has not had a problem racking up credits, appearing in movies such as 2019's *Once Upon a Time in Hollywood*, *Honey Don't!*, and *Blue Moon*. And she'd previously been nominated for Golden Globe and Emmy awards for her role in Netflix drama *Maid*, but 2024's *The Substance* got a 13-minute standing ovation at Cannes, brought her a second Golden Globe nomination, and caused EW to label her exclusion from the 2025 Academy Award nominations a "snub" after the actress pushed herself to the brink, emotionally and physically, for the part.

"To act confident when you don’t feel confident, to act like you feel hot when you don’t feel hot, is so much harder," she told EW, than she anticipated. She said she felt pushed to the limit "every goddamned day" and called the dancing "brutal" to look back on.

Even the prosthetics took their toll.

"It took me probably, like, a year to recover physically from all of it," she revealed on the *Happy Sad Confused* podcast. "When they're shooting up my skirt at the end, or in the beginning credits, when it's, like, the palm trees all around, and they have, like, all these long lenses from the bottom. That's just because my face was so f---ed up by that time that they couldn't, like, shoot my face anymore."

*The Substance* is now available to stream on HBOMax. Qualley next stars with Glen Powell in A24 comedy-thriller *How to Make a Killing*, which releases in theaters on Feb. 20.**

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