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"  Even the most talented clairvoyant at the carnival would have a hard time guessing Sarah Margaret Qualley&amp;#039;s age. The 19-year-old actress was a career ballerina before what she describes as the early onset midlife crisis, at 16, that brought her to acting. Qualley (you can call her Margaret) now stars in HBO&amp;#039;s The Leftovers, a post-apocalyptic drama adapted from Tom Perrota&amp;#039;s novel of the same name, which takes place after a good chunk of the world population disappears without a trace. It&amp;#039;s her first TV credit and her second overall (she first appeared in Gia Coppola&amp;#039;s Tribeca Film Festival flick, Palo Alto), and precocious doesn&amp;#039;t quite cover Qualley&amp;#039;s breakthrough performance as the angry, awkward teenage Jill Garvey. Life on screen wasn&amp;#039;t entirely foreign to Qualley, the younger daughter of Andie MacDowell and model Paul Qualley. But Qualley&amp;#039;s determined to make a name for herself, one that isn&amp;#039;t MacDowell, and it doesn&amp;#039;t look like she&amp;#039;s having too tough a time. Gearing up for the big premiere, she opened up about getting into character, the world&amp;#039;s most romantic city, and why she couldn&amp;#039;t sit through her own pilot. Harper&amp;#039;s BAZAAR: The Leftovers is your first TV gig. How did you get involved in the project? Margaret Qualley: I was working in LA at the time, where I auditioned, and a couple weeks later, I was told about chemistry reads that were happening in New York. They sort of said I could go, but I would have to pay my way. But I really loved the character and the project, so I flew myself to New York and auditioned for [director] Peter Berg and [co-creator] Damon Lindelof. I ended up doing about 30 minutes of improv with Peter. It was a really wild experience, a fun one, and I left the room feeling really, really good. HB: I&amp;#039;ve seen the pilot already, and I can&amp;#039;t wait to see the rest. I keep bugging HBO to send me more. MQ: I only watched the first half of the pilot to be honest. HB: So I know this series better than you do, basically. MQ: Yeah, I went to a screening and was so terrified watching myself. I was like shaking and sweating.  HB: Set the scene. MQ: So The Leftovers takes place three years after 2% of the population has gone missing. And it&amp;#039;s about how that changes society. Cults form as a result, and it drastically changes home life for a lot of people, including the Garvey family, which is the family I belong to. I play Justin Theroux and Amy Brenneman&amp;#039;s daughter and Chris Zylka&amp;#039;s sister. HB: Do you think about the show as sci-fi? It is, technically, but it feels like home life\u2014normal home life\u2014is almost more central to the show than its apocalyptic premise is. MQ: I think it&amp;#039;s a really fun combination because while it does have science fiction elements, it&amp;#039;s also very character-driven and realistic. HB: Did you read Tom Perrotta&amp;#039;s book [which the series is based on] before filming? MQ: I did. Well, I read it on the plane from LA right before that chemistry read, just in one sitting. I flipped through it fast. Amazing. HB: Tell me about your character, Jill Garvey, and how you got into her mindset. MQ: Jill is in trouble. I think that, like a lot of high schoolers, she feels a particular pressure, and it influences her in a way that makes her act out. But not only is she dealing with the high school all teenagers have to deal with, she&amp;#039;s also in this particularly depressing world where everyone has lost someone. My mom&amp;#039;s not home, and my dad&amp;#039;s struggling with all sorts of chaos in the town as the chief of police, and Jill is shy and introverted\u2014but also she&amp;#039;s very angry and brave. HB: You were a dancer your entire life and studied with the American Ballet Theater. What made you decide to pick up acting? MQ: I actually quit ballet when I was offered a job, an apprenticeship at North Carolina Dance Theater Company, run by John Pierre Bonnefoux and Patricia McBride, who are my idols. Everything sort of went perfectly. I was 16, and I was about to drop out of high school and become a professional ballet dancer. And then I realized that even though I had been striving for that, I no longer really wanted it. So I moved to New York, lived there alone in an apartment, and tried to figure out what I wanted to do with my life because I always had been so career driven that I just assumed--or felt obligated--to know what I wanted to do, even at 16. And I did\u2014I used that year of eleventh grade to figure out what I wanted to do next. I explored the arts in general; I took painting classes and sketching classes and acting classes and all sorts of different things. I was having a really early on-set midlife crisis, and then something clicked in an improv class, and I knew. HB: Do you think your ballet training helped you as an actor? MQ: Actually, it gives me some bad habits. On the plus side, I&amp;#039;m very aware of my body. Jill is not the kind of person who stands upright. She&amp;#039;s not proud or confident. So I do little things like walk around set with my shoulders hunched or listen to music, and it helps me register a physicality that helps create the character Jill. But on the other side, I think that ballet has a mentality of trying to be perfect, and what&amp;#039;s beautiful about acting is that it can be really messy. HB: What are you most curious to find out about Jill? MQ: I get excited every time they send a script. I like rush home to my computer and read as fast as I can, and then I call Emily [Meade]. Emily, who plays [my best friend] Aimee, and I became really good friends, and we live about five blocks away from each other. It&amp;#039;s been amazing to have such a good friend on the show. She really has my back. HB: And how are you liking New York, now your home? MQ: It&amp;#039;s the most romantic city in the world. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.harpersbazaar.com/culture/features/a2689/moment-with-margaret-qualley/>