Movies

Poor Things' Biggest Mistake? Sidelining This Talent (But There’s Still a Chance to Fix It)

Poor Things' Biggest Mistake? Sidelining This Talent (But There’s Still a Chance to Fix It)
Image credit: Netflix, Searchlight Pictures

Poor Things owes its stunning success to a star-packed cast — but one of its figures in particular was severely overlooked.

Summary:

  • Yorgos Lanthimos’ Poor Things made top Oscar winners this year, despite having let one of the most prominent actresses stay in the shadow.
  • Margaret Qualley, who played another human experiment for Defoe’s Dr. Godwin Baxter, didn’t appear on the screen as much as the viewers would’ve wanted her to.
  • The actress is still getting a chance of a big screen appearance by landing a role in Lanthimos’s upcoming film.

Yorgos Lanthimos’ drama Poor Things was one of the biggest wins for this year’s Oscar night — the film took home four Academy awards, including Emma Stone ’s triumphant statuette for Best Actress.

While the company for Stone’s astonishing performance was quite famous — Mark Ruffalo, Willem Defoe, and Ramy Youssef played alongside her — one of the outstanding cast members was, according to many fans’ beliefs, unjustly deprived of having more screen time that she eventually had.

In Poor Things case this can only be said about Margaret Qualley — a young and pretty much promising actress who inherited her subtle acting skills straight from her mother, Andie MacDowell.

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In Lanthimos’s hit film Qualley portrays another experimental girl being under vigilant inspection of Dr. Godwin Baxter after his first “experiment”, Bella Baxter, runs away. However, even having a role similar to the one of Emma Stone, Qualley doesn’t get even a quarter of the viewer’s overall attention.

This seems to be even more disappointing when remembering that Margaret Qualley isn’t new in the acting world — earlier, she had a little role in Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, but received everyone’s acclaim after portraying a single mother struggling to provide for her daughter in a Netflix series Maid.

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All this suggested Qualley would once again have her big moment on screen in Poor Things, but it never happened.

Though there’s still another big film opportunity for the actress on the way — and again with Lanthimos directing. Margaret Qualley will reunite (not after a long time) with her co-stars Emma Stone and Willem Defoe, also getting to work together with Jesse Plemmons, Joe Alwyn, Hunter Schafer and others on the set of Lanthimos’s upcoming film Kinds of Kindness.

While there’s not so much to know about the new project, some already published photos give fans hope that Qualley this time landed a much more significant role than in Poor Things.