The 1980 movie that transformed acting, according to Margaret Qualley
As years and decades pass, and great films come and go, it’s probably natural to think about the acting talent of generations gone by and to cast an eye over who might be their modern equivalents.
The 1960s and ‘70s were packed with incredible young actors who changed the face of Hollywood with their talent and ambition, and Margaret Qualley is heading in that direction fast.
Over the last ten years, few other actors have her track record of making either great, brave or uncomfortable movies, and just into her 30s, Qualley has shown that she’s just as likely to make an X-rated arthouse film as she is a fully-fledged blockbuster, with the result being that she’s likely to soon be doing much more of the latter.
The first example of that is Ridley Scott’s The Dog Stars, alongside Jacob Elordi and Josh Brolin, a big-budget, post-pandemic, sci-fi action movie that hits cinemas at the end of August and sees Qualley in one of the lead roles on Scott’s biggest film since Gladiator II back in 2024.
It feels like a natural progression for Qualley, who, up until this point, probably got most attention and praise for the jaw-dropping Coralie Fargeat body horror The Substance, in which she left absolutely nothing on the field in playing the young mirror-opposite to Demi Moore’s equally impressive fading star, the two actors from different eras swapping scenes and fluids to astonishing effect.
A shocking, disturbing visual feast for the senses, The Substance was unlike anything seen in mainstream cinemas for some time, if ever. Fargeat stripped back all the glamour of the entertainment industry, showing it literally warts and all, employing Qualley as the on-screen representation of the way Hollywood will gorge on ambitious starlets while those at the other end of the scale will do literally anything to stay in the spotlight.
Fargeat was nominated for ‘Best Director’ by both the Academy Awards and the Golden Globes for the movie, which was clearly influenced by one of the all-time greats in the form of Stanley Kubrick. Throughout The Substance, there were thematic, musical and visual cues from the master’s incredible 2001: A Space Odyssey from 1968, while the violence and underlying feeling of terror are reminiscent of 1971’s A Clockwork Orange. Then there is the camera work, which pays heavy tribute to perhaps Kubrick’s most disturbing film, 1980’s The Shining.
That adaptation of Stephen King’s supernatural best-seller about a writer going to pieces with his young family at a snowbound hotel is one of the most famous and effective horrors of all time, and at its core is an increasingly unhinged, meltdown for the ages by Jack Nicholson as the axe-wielding husband-gone-insane Jack Torrance.
It’s a moment in acting that Qualley herself recognises as pivotal, and asked by Collider to name her favourite Kubrick film, she replied: “I mean, Jack Nicholson, like, invented a style of performing in The Shining with him.”
Despite Nicholson’s performance having gone down in history, the film wasn’t actually that well-received initially; in fact, it received several nominations for Golden Raspberries. One of those, for the late Shelley Duvall, was later rescinded in 2022 when it came to light she had been very harshly treated by Kubrick throughout the production, adding a new layer of terror and truth to her emotional, panicked breakdown on repeated viewings.
