Photo: Alex Lockett
Given Qualley’s illustrious career working with some of contemporary cinema’s greatest auteurs—Claire Denis, Yorgos Lanthimos, and Quentin Tarantino among them—was stepping into the director’s seat a long-held ambition? “It wasn’t really,” Qualley admits, laughing. “I mean, obviously I’ve spent a lot of time on sets and I’ve had a front-row seat to some of the best directors, but I think of myself as an actress. I just felt like I could execute this specific video.”
In fact, for Qualley, working on the video reflected some of the most exciting experiences of her acting career thus far—namely, those that allowed her to showcase her abilities as a dancer, and balance that very different performance skill set with her love for acting. There was her breakout moment as the star of Spike Jonze’s jaw-dropping fragrance advert for Kenzo back in 2016, which saw Qualley step away from a ritzy gala dinner to fling herself around the foyer of Los Angeles’s Dorothy Chandler Pavilion with furious abandon; plus, of course, her acclaimed turn as one of her heroes, the Broadway star and Bob Fosse muse Ann Reinking, in FX’s Fosse/Verdon.
“I grew up doing competition-style dancing,” she explains. “So You Think You Can Dance is maybe the easiest reference I can think of if you don’t know that world: rhinestones and tights and eyelashes, that kind of thing, and going to these tiny little cities in North and South Carolina and staying in motels and doing these competitions on the weekends. It was my favorite thing to do but it kind of had an expiration date to it. At first, I tried to figure out whether I wanted to be in a ballet company or something, but it wasn’t quite right, and then I became an actor—so to still have these opportunities to express myself through dance is always really special for me.”