In the video for the latest single from Bleachers’ upcoming fourth, self-titled album, a camera descends over a pier in New Jersey, overlooking the shimmering Manhattan skyline beyond. Then Margaret Qualley steps into the frame: Illuminated by the headlights of a Cadillac, the actor pirouettes and high kicks in a gauzy white dress, performing for a viewer that is slowly revealed to be Jack Antonoff himself. Titled “Tiny Moves,” the song serves as an ode by the singer-songwriter behind Bleachers to Qualley, whom Antonoff married in a low-key wedding last August. (“The tiniest moves you make,” he croons on the track. “Watching my whole world shake.”)
For Qualley, who not only stars in the video, but also co-directed it with photographer and filmmaker Alex Lockett (and worked with Patricia Villirillo on creative direction and styling duties), the whole project felt like a happy accident. “It really started with me wanting to make a dance to one of the songs, and ‘Tiny Moves’ just felt right, because it’s super poppy and fun,” says Qualley from her apartment in Brooklyn. (She’s about to head to Long Beach Island—where she and Antonoff tied the knot, and where they now spend much of their time together—for the weekend.) “I started making up the dance, and I tweaked that for a good while, and then I started imagining it as a video and coming up with a shot list. So it just happened organically.”
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.”
It’s a discipline Qualley has made sure to keep up, no matter where she finds herself: renting a small studio in Brooklyn to practice, or even heading to the beach in New Jersey during the quiet season to dance by the water. “That can be a little embarrassing, though,” she says, laughing again. “The more space the better, but honestly, the living room will do.” When it came to the “Tiny Moves” video, the process of putting it together was equally organic: not least with the choice of location. “I feel like given the number of times I’ve heard Jack talk about being in New Jersey looking over at the city, it was a pretty baked-in landscape for me to choose,” she says.
Indeed, the overarching motivation for the video for Qualley was to create something of an homage to Antonoff and the creative synergy they share, even while working in different industries. “I feel like I learn so much from him all of the time,” she says. “Sometimes if you look at the way that somebody’s doing something within a field that’s not your own, and you compare it to what you’re doing, you can learn more, because there’s a different perspective. So I’m always running things by him, and vice versa, because I think it’s kind of nice to have that zoomed-out lens sometimes. If you’re really in the thick of it, certain things can seem huge, when the reality is they’re small, you know?”
For the “Tiny Moves” video, her ambition was equally humble. “More than anything it was kind of just a love letter to Jack,” she says. “We made this a few weeks before we got married, and I just thought it would be the kind of thing that, one day, I might want to show the kids.” Naturally, then, Qualley is probably the person most excited about the release of the new Bleachers record, which drops on March 8. “I love it,” she says, lighting up with enthusiasm. “It’s my favorite one yet—but maybe I’m biased. It’s brilliant. Jack is brilliant.”
