Actress, dancer and coyote feeder: introducing indie actress Margaret Qualley

It’s a sweltering hot day in Los Angeles and, in a bohemian café in the understated neighbourhood of Echo Park, Margaret Qualley is telling me how she spends her free time. ‘We call it coyote hunting but actually it’s more like coyote nurturing,’ says the 22-year-old actress and model of her habit of cruising around Hollywood with her sister, Rainey, and feeding the city’s prairie wolves. ‘My sister and I are pretty dorky, so we drive around at night in her car listening to old Disney songs and feed the coyotes cans of wet cat food, which I’m sure is a terrible idea. Meanwhile, Cinderella and Sleeping Beauty showtunes are playing in the background. It’s a big night for us,’ she laughs.

Despite the heat, the star of HBO’s dystopian drama The Leftovers is wearing a high-collared white blouse underneath a grey jersey sweater and a jacket. ‘I’m such a grandma,’ she laughs. Still, her normcore attire does nothing to disguise her rather regal beauty. She has inherited the luminescent complexion of her mother, actress Andie McDowell, and soulful eyes of her father, a former Gap model turned rancher and property developer named Paul Qualley. Her pale skin, full lips and tiny gap between her front teeth combine with her wry self-mockery and slightly awkward manner to give her the geeky charm of a character from a Wes Anderson movie.

In fact if you were to storyboard a Hollywood indie darling for 2017, you might come up with something a bit like Qualley. The former ballet prodigy had an early role opposite Ryan Gosling (playing a rebellious teenager who gets kidnapped because she resembles a porn star in the hilarious police caper The Nice Guys); became an internet sensation thanks to her free-spirited dancing in a Spike Jonze-directed viral ad for Kenzo World perfume; and more recently, won Sundance Film Festival plaudits for her performance as a shy teenage nun in the convent drama, Novitiate. Her upcoming projects include two Netflix films: Io, an indie sci-fi drama starring Danny Huston in which Qualley will play a girl racing to find a cure for what led to Earth’s destruction; and Death Note, a supernatural thriller based on the Japanese manga comics in which she stars alongside Willem Dafoe. But Qualley has a few quirks you couldn’t invent in a million years. Aside from the coyote feeding, she tells me, ‘I’ve recently fallen in love with bees so I’m trying to save them. I’m investing in an apiary!’

She may have attended the Met Ball this year wearing a striking white gown with sculptural sleeves by Prabal Gurung, but Qualley insists that mostly, her life hasn’t changed since she first found success in The Leftovers. The series, which ran from 2014 until this year, saw her take a leading role as Justin Theroux’s jaded teenage daughter. She attributes this to the fact that she lives with Rainey, 27, a sultry blues singer and sometime actress who recently bought a house around the corner from the coffee shop we’re in now. ‘She’s my idol, my best friend in the whole world. I wanted to be close to her so I live in her guest bedroom,’ Qualley says, sipping her iced tea. ‘We have a puppy together. His name is Books — he is adorable. I think I would find being in Hollywood intense if I had more of a social life but all I do is stay indoors with my sister and play with our puppy, watch movies.’

Still, she can’t escape her own buzz. Midway through our conversation, a dude in a hipster fedora appears at our table to declare that her deranged three-minute dance solo for Kenzo (released last summer) was ‘the coolest commercial out there’. It may be a fragrance commercial, but ‘My Mutant Brain’ has been a strong calling card. Choreographed by Ryan Heffington (known for his music videos for Arcade Fire and Florence + The Machine), it sees Qualley convulse wildly around the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion in downtown LA, front-flipping, shooting lasers and leaping through an enormous floral sculpture.

When she turned up at Jonze’s Manhattan apartment for the audition, he explained he envisioned a girl losing control after sneaking out of a stuffy black-tie dinner. ‘He’d yell out instructions like, “Now you’re a vampire,” “Now you’ve lost control of your arm and it’s out to get you,” and “Now you’re slaying dragons.” He was filming all this on his phone while I was jumping on his coffee table and crawling around on his floor. When I left, drenched in sweat, my agents called me to see how it had gone and I said: “He either thinks I’m the craziest, most bananas chick out there or it’s gonna work out.”’ It worked out.

Qualley was born in Montana in 1994, the same year that MacDowell’s career hit, Four Weddings and a Funeral, was released. However, since she and her siblings, Justin, 30, and Rainey lived on a sprawling, 3,000-acre ranch without a TV, she says she only got around to seeing the successful British rom-com for the first time last year. ‘We didn’t grow up watching her movies. She made an effort just to be a mom, which I’m grateful for.’ Later, the family moved to a small town called Asheville, which Qualley describes as the ‘hippy centre of North Carolina’. Her parents separated when she was five, and she split her time with her mother and father equally, though she says: ‘Like every child of divorce I had parent-trap fantasies. In fact, The Parent Trap was my favourite movie. I was a Nineties baby so I particularly loved the Lindsay Lohan version. I made a point of telling my mom how much I loved the movie — talked about it a lot. And then she started dating Dennis Quaid [who stars in the film]. And I was like, “Noooo! You got it all wrong! This is not what I meant at all!”’

Her parents generally let her choose her own path. ‘It was: “You want ice cream twice a day, you can have it,” and, “You don’t have to go to school if you don’t want to.” And I was like, “Yeah, I have to.” And now I think “Margaret, what the f*** were you doing?”’ Qualley says her father taught her how to forge his signature so she could sign off her own report cards. ‘I use his signature as my own to this day.’

By that point she had already fallen in love with ballet, having been taken to dance lessons as a toddler. She also had a strong desire to get out of Asheville without ever knowing where exactly ‘out’ was. ‘I made [dance] my ticket out. I thought if I was really good I could go to ballet school.’ She did, leaving home at 14 to board at the North Carolina School of the Arts. It was an experience both liberating and crushing. ‘I love the school… but it’s a normal part of the culture of ballet to go to a nutritionist in your first few weeks. They write down everything you eat and use a little roller that pinches you to measure the fat all over your body. They calculate all your measurements and then every semester, you get a letter saying either you’re too thin or you’re okay or you’re overweight. You have to adjust accordingly and if you don’t you’re not asked back the next year. It’s s***ty; it’s really hard.’