Top 10 Margaret Qualley Movies, Ranked

Margaret Qualley has built a career on saying yes to the uncomfortable thing. Where other actors might hedge, she leans in: the barefoot cult girl, the dominatrix in a hotel room, the woman literally tearing herself apart on screen. At TV Hulk, we ranked these performances by how fully she disappeared into each role and how much that commitment stayed with us after the credits rolled. The bolder the choice, the higher the climb. What follows is our breakdown of the ten films where Qualley proved, again and again, that she’s one of the most fearless performers working right now.

10. Donnybrook (2018)

Delia Angus is the kind of character most actors would play at arm’s length, and Qualley refuses to give herself that distance. Trapped in a grinding cycle of rural poverty and domestic violence, Delia moves through Tim Sutton’s bleak Appalachian drama with a worn-down physicality that feels lived-in rather than performed. There’s a scene where she flinches at a sound in the next room, and the way Qualley holds her breath before deciding whether to run says more about Delia’s life than any line of dialogue could. The film barely registered at the box office and reviews were mixed, but her work here is genuinely harrowing. She doesn’t soften a single edge of it, and that unflinching commitment makes Donnybrook worth tracking down.

9. Stars at Noon (2022)

Trish is stranded in Nicaragua, running low on money and options, and Qualley makes you feel every layer of that desperation without ever letting it tip into self-pity. Claire Denis’s slow-burn thriller asks a lot of its lead: long stretches of silence, a suffocating atmosphere, and a romance with Joe Alwyn that has to carry the film’s emotional weight almost entirely on chemistry alone. Qualley holds up her end of that bargain. Watch the scene where Trish negotiates her way out of a dangerous situation using nothing but nerve and a practiced smile — what’s striking is how Qualley keeps that smile just slightly too wide, so you can see the effort behind it even as Trish sells the performance to the room.

8. My Salinger Year (2020)

Joanna arrives in New York with a notebook full of poems and romantic ideas about literary life, and Qualley plays that wide-eyed idealism without making it feel foolish. Adapted from Joanna Rakoff’s memoir, the film follows her as she fields fan mail for J.D. Salinger’s estate while quietly questioning every assumption she brought with her. It’s interior, quiet work, and Qualley is good at it: there’s a moment where Joanna reads one of Salinger’s letters aloud to a fan over the phone, and the shift in her expression as the words land is small but completely convincing. Critics who found the film too gentle still pointed to her performance as the reason to sit through it. A grounded showcase for what she can do when the material asks her to slow down.

7. Drive-Away Dolls (2024)

Jamie Dobbs barrels into every scene like she’s already three steps ahead of everyone else and twice as loud, and Qualley plays that energy with a comedic looseness she hadn’t been given room to show before. Ethan Coen’s road comedy pairs her with Geraldine Viswanathan, and their dynamic is the film’s best asset: there’s a diner sequence where Jamie talks her way through a situation she clearly doesn’t understand, and Qualley’s timing is sharp enough to make it land as funny rather than just chaotic. The film didn’t connect with wide audiences and the script has real gaps, but her performance holds up regardless. It’s her first real shot at carrying a mainstream comedy vehicle, and she makes the case most convincingly in that diner scene, where she keeps a straight face just long enough before letting the whole thing collapse.

6. Kinds of Kindness (2024)

Four characters in one film could easily become a gimmick, but Qualley makes Vivian, Martha, Ruth, and Rebecca feel like four separate people who happen to share a face. Yorgos Lanthimos’s anthology is deliberately strange and cold, and she matches its register perfectly: in the second segment, a dinner scene has her performing domestic contentment with a smile that doesn’t quite reach her eyes, and the gap between those two things is where all the tension lives. Each woman has a different posture, a different way of occupying space, and that physical specificity is what separates the performance from mere costume-changing.

5. The Nice Guys (2016)

Amelia Kuttner is the reason everything in Shane Black’s sun-baked 1970s LA comedy-thriller is happening, and Qualley makes sure you never forget that she’s the sharpest person in any room she walks into. In a film where Russell Crowe and Ryan Gosling are doing some of their best comedic work together, she holds her own by playing it straight: Amelia’s political convictions are real, her fear is real, and Qualley refuses to let the character become a plot device even when the script is more interested in the two leads. There’s a confrontation scene midway through where she faces down both of them with a calm, controlled fury that briefly stops the movie’s momentum cold, and the way she keeps her voice almost bored while her eyes stay absolutely locked on Gosling is what makes it land.

4. Sanctuary (2022)

Rebecca controls the room from the moment she walks in, and so does Qualley. Zachary Wigon’s two-hander locks her in a hotel suite opposite Christopher Abbott for nearly the entire runtime, and what unfolds is a power struggle that keeps shifting underneath your feet. She moves through the film’s escalating tension with remarkable precision: one minute Rebecca is all menace, laying out the terms of their arrangement with a calm that’s more threatening than any raised voice, and the next she cracks open just enough to make you wonder how much of what she’s showing him is real. The scene where the dynamic between them finally inverts is the film’s centerpiece, and Qualley plays it without telegraphing the turn. Critics singled her out as the engine that makes the whole thing work, and they weren’t wrong.

3. Novitiate (2017)

Long before the bigger roles arrived, Qualley was carrying an entire film on her back. Sister Cathleen enters the convent with her whole heart, and the film’s central tension is watching that devotion collide with everything her body and her doubt are telling her. Qualley plays the spiritual hunger as completely real, not naive or misguided, which makes the collision hit harder. There’s a scene where Cathleen is alone in her cell after a moment of crisis, and Qualley sits with the silence in a way that lets the full weight of what she’s choosing and what she’s losing settle over you. Margaret Betts’s film got strong notices out of Sundance, and the performance was the consistent thread in every positive review. It remains the clearest early proof that she was built for lead roles.

2. Once Upon a Time in Hollywood (2019)

Pussycat doesn’t have a lot of screen time, and she doesn’t need it. Qualley’s barefoot hitchhiker materializes in Cliff Booth’s truck with a sun-drenched, slightly dangerous energy that immediately makes you want to know everything about her, and Tarantino is smart enough to leave most of it a mystery. The scene where she rides with Brad Pitt’s Cliff out to Spahn Ranch is the film’s most quietly unsettling stretch, and Qualley carries it almost entirely through physical presence: the way she sits, the way she watches him, the way she smiles at exactly the wrong moments. In a film packed with memorable images, she creates one of the most indelible, and nowhere is that more apparent than in how she holds her body completely still while her eyes do all the restless, searching work.

1. The Substance (2024)

Sue is the role that announced Qualley as a full-blown movie star, and she made sure everyone heard it. Coralie Fargeat’s body-horror provocation asks her to do things most actors would quietly pass on: physically extreme, emotionally raw, committed to a grotesque transformation with no safety net. Qualley throws herself into all of it. The early scenes where Sue performs her television fitness show are almost uncomfortably perfect — a precise portrait of a woman who has learned to package herself for consumption, and then the film starts pulling that apart piece by piece. What makes the performance land isn’t the spectacle, though. It’s the quieter moments — like the way Qualley holds a beat of pure longing before Sue makes the choice that starts everything unraveling, her face doing the work before a single word lands.