WATCHING THE SWANS

Margaret Qualley and Lana Del Rey were friends at first sight. As their art reaches the stratosphere, they’re united in seeking out life’s more mundane pleasures.

By Megan Hullander

Pain isn’t beauty, but the two are often grouped together. It’s certainly the case, at least, with The Substance, Coralie Fargeat’s satirical body-horror thriller. In simple terms, the plot goes like this: Demi Moore’s Elisabeth Sparkle, a faded aerobics star, is made to feel irrelevant because of her age. Enter: the Substance, a neon green liquid that births a new and “improved” you. Elisabeth’s better self, born from a line sliced down her spine, is Margaret Qualley’s Sue—young, toned, and impossibly beautiful. Over weekly shifts, one lives while the other’s lifeless body is stuffed into a makeshift closet. The morbid, Faustian nature of the Substance’s promise quickly makes itself plain, and the resulting rivalry between the two women sets off a series of increasingly gruesome consequences until there is no longer any beauty—just pain.

On the surface, The Substance contains an easy feminist narrative: Youth and beauty are currency in Hollywood, and when either wanes, a person’s value follows suit—especially if you’re a woman. But Elisabeth is never made out to be obscenely vain or unreasonable for desiring that superficially better self. (Wouldn’t we all?) And there’s a certain, maybe brilliant, irony in the fact that Margaret had to work to become a physical ideal for a film that critiques women needing to conform to physical ideals in films. Beauty standards are bad is a true statement, but all too simplistic. Women aren’t evil for desiring beauty. It’s more complicated than that.

It’s more complicated than that are words you are likely to hear from a Lana Del Rey fan. Most famously in the sense that her songs glamorize the crumbling American empire and the darker sides of romantic love: “I fall asleep in an American flag / I wear my diamonds on Skid Row / I pledge allegiance to my dad / For teaching me everything he knows.” In her lyrics, female melancholy and desire exist in tandem. Lana and Margaret are interested in fairy tales, and fairy tales aren’t picture perfect: They have monsters and missteps. Sometimes they take inverted form (as in The Substance), sometimes they’re defined by ideals that are as alluring as they are antiquated (à la Lana).

These polysemic fairy tales are complicated. But Margaret and Lana credit simple things for the more fantastical parts of their real lives. They are both small-town girls who made it big: Margaret was raised on a ranch in Montana before moving to Asheville, North Carolina; Lana grew up in Lake Placid, New York. They both love dance. Margaret’s professionally trained, but often uses it playfully, like in the silly routines she used to woo her now-husband Jack Antonoff; Lana swaying across the stage is the picture of modern pop. And the realest point of their connection is very plain: love. They share the whole-bodied kind that necessitates Shakespearean confessions of adoration each time they speak. The below conversation has been condensed for length, but each compliment originally appeared in paragraphs, framed with an I love you on either side.

LANA DEL REY: The minute I met you, I fell in love. It was apparent to me immediately that you’re completely rare. Not only are you an amazing person, but you’re an amazing actress—working with all these amazing directors on these amazing films. I thought, This is going to be one of those fairy tale stories.

MARGARET QUALLEY: Lana, you sure as hell make me feel like my life is a fairy tale. I couldn’t love you more. You’re an earth angel and my favorite poet. Thank you for doing this with me—this little interview and this thing called life. How surreal is it to realize that your dream job is also your real job? It’s been just over 10 years for me, and it’s taken about that long to have it really be like, There will be highs, there will be lows.

LDR: It’s crazy that it can take that long to feel that way. I remember there was this tipping point where I was like, Oh, this is now a hundred percent something where she can pick and choose her roles. Kind of like how I could pick and choose my shows or sing where I want to and about what I want to.

MQ: It’s when you realize that you get to design it.

LDR: Yeah. You want to be able to feel in control, at least in some ways. I think a lot of people don’t, whether that has to do with age or beauty or anything else. That’s also why I think we’re so close—it’s not that we “don’t care.” It’s just never been about, Is this gonna end? It’s more, Oh, it’s so good that it began.

MQ: Absolutely. Well, I know that we’re both really into manifesting. I don’t think that either of us are zoomed out, thinking about the whole trajectory of a thing. It’s listening to your heart and trying to figure out what it’s telling you so that you can just plan the very next thing, because you actually have to do that thing in order to know what’s going to come afterwards.

LDR: You have to be able to stay present to do a good job. Which is hard. I know that’s why you were so close to Demi. It’s always amazing to work with somebody where you can learn from them, and on top of that, really like them.

MQ: I really do love her. It was really special to be making a movie about women who were pitted against each other and not have any part of that in our dynamic. We had each other’s backs so hard. But also, the movie has this ’80s aesthetic, and it’s interesting [acting] in a world that Demi lived through, and is so much wiser and cooler from having endured. I’m super grateful to have had her to hold hands with, as we really did have to enter the eye of the storm.

LDR: You were completely in the eye of the storm, and for so long. It was a rigorous schedule—getting in and out of prosthetics and costumes almost every single day.

MQ: It made me think about what it’d be like to be on tour—having to put on your showgirl outfit and do the thing. It’s so amazing that you’re able to endlessly give this to your audience. You are such a sensitive soul. To be able to push through, to be able to support that many people every single night, no matter how you’re feeling, is just really astounding. I don’t have to tap into the feeling of confidence very much. Like, a lot of times I’ve played characters that are just as insecure as I am—or just as strange or weird or affected or neurotic.

LDR: Like, closer to who you are.

MQ: To give confidence and sex appeal, I mean… It’s a really hard thing to do.

LDR: When I’m getting ready for a show, it’s hard if I don’t have time to think about what I want the show to be. Luckily, most of the time I get to know whether I’m going to be in jeans or a dress. It’s so different from being an actress, where you’re at the whim of what the character is supposed to be, and how you’ve decided you want to play it.

MQ: This is a tricky one, because not everyone agrees with me here: I think of actors slightly more as craftspeople than artists in a sense. Like, you’re a true artist—you make the art, your entire life is lived as an artist. You’re living your life, you’re writing your songs, you’re coming up with the show, you’re performing the show.

LDR: It’s kind of like, It’s all about you!

MQ: Oh my gosh, no! That’s not what I was saying!

LDR: No, I was putting it that way! I mean, it sometimes sucks. I guess it’s a lot of pressure in that way, if you’re not feeling yourself.

MQ: I really do think of acting as somewhere between being a vessel and a craftsperson. It’s a really special normal job.

LDR: I think it was Marlon Brando who said he was talking to somebody who didn’t have a job in entertainment, who was like, “You’re an amazing actor.” And he said, “Well, you’re an actor too.” If we’re having a conversation—whatever comes out of your mouth and however you decide to say it and the mannerisms you have—no matter how authentically you it is, it’s still acting upon what you feel that day and how you want to portray yourself. I do think the thing we have in common is that we are still heart-driven and intuition-driven. That’s why you’ve gotten so many amazing roles, because not only do people know you can do it, they really are curious to see how you’re gonna do it.

Would you say that makes you more or less excited to pick a role that’s closer to who you are?

MQ: Um, I don’t know. I guess I kind of feel like no matter what the role is, you’re [playing] a part of yourself. It’s just like, How many parts of yourself do you bring out? For Sue, it was a teeny, teeny part of me. It was kind of exhausting because you’re having to draw from that same narrow, tiny place, making it as big as you can. It’s kind of like if you have a bad thought in your head and you’re trying not to think about it, and actually, what you have to do is just think the bad thought really hard so that you can let go of it. That was the experience of playing Sue.

I find myself to be very reactionary. Whatever I’ve just done influences the way I choose to be in the world. While I have this movie out, I dress more simply and wear black and make sure that people know I’m just a dork. It’s in reaction to playing something hypersexualized and ultra-femme—I want to kind of even it out.

LDR: I think it’s the exact same for me. I wouldn’t want to have any personal experiences that would take me too far away from being able to do that, because then I’d have to recalibrate every single day to get back into character. If something upsetting happened or even something really good, I would have to keep getting myself back to that place.

I mean, one thing I know about you is that you are so much yourself. I just feel that playing someone so different from you, and knowing that you’re going to slip into a completely different character right after that movie—on top of having such a rich personal life—would be a lot of worlds to hold in one hand. You’re an old-fashioned actress in that way. You pour everything into it. And then you’re like, Hey, don’t take me too far out!

MQ: I feel like neither of us are jealous or competitive people, but the thing that we tend to envy is just peace of mind. You and I are both constantly striving towards calm, peace, inner stability, and feeling like, Oh, I just want to go to lunch.

LDR: I just want to be simple! I say simple with the sweetest connotation. Simple is not a persona or a characteristic to fake.

MQ: There’s that parable about a fisherman: He’s a simple fisherman that just fishes for his family, but he’s really good and they’re like, “Why don’t you open up a restaurant?” And so then he opens up a restaurant and the restaurant goes well, and he works really hard so that one day he can go back to fishing just for him and his family. I feel like we’re both trying to just fish for ourselves and our family, while also chasing our dreams, which is a funny line to walk. When we’re talking about simple, we’re talking about Siddhartha. We’re talking about The Alchemist, about being able to realize that this is it. Today is the best that it gets—right now and every single day.

LDR: I always love a fisherman’s analogy. I have learned and I’m still learning that everybody’s process of going through life is different. Some people need to make things complicated to make things simple for themselves in the long run.

MQ: Also to feel safe! Family and wholesomeness are really important to both of us.

LDR: I remember getting a letter from a journalist that was sent to my house: “You don’t have to keep policing how good you are. You can be bad.” The audacity of someone saying that! I never had to strive to feel like I was doing things simply, or being the best version of myself—that part just came naturally. I remember thinking [the journalist] seemed sort of angry about it, in a way. I don’t relate to needing that advice. Really, I trust my partner to give me advice and I trust myself, too. I think that’s when we can also call each other and be like, This doesn’t feel good to me.

MQ: The best gift is to have friends who know you really well.

LDR: I believe that magic comes from feeling safe. And safety comes from being clear—like when you feel clear about what your role is and whether you’re doing a good job and whether people understand it. But I know a lot of other people like to operate from chaos.

MQ: We just want to go to the park and see the swans.