Margaret Qualley is a true one-of-a-kind force in film and television. Her work is always appointment viewing because her filmography is brimming with variety and unique characters that challenge her to swing big in new ways. From The Leftovers and The Nice Guys to The Substance and Honey Don’t, those roles don’t work unless they’re filled with an actor willing to pour every ounce of themself into bringing them to life on screen, and that right there is a consistent truth of Qualley’s work.

In her latest, Ethan Coen and Tricia Cooke’s Drive-Away Dolls follow-up film, Honey Don’t, Qualley headlines as the title character. Honey is a private investigator in Bakersfield, California who gets caught up in a series of deaths tied to a mysterious church. With the help of her assistant (Gabby Beans), Honey’s attempt to crack the case puts her in Reverend Drew Devlin’s (Chris Evans) orbit and overlaps with her budding relationship with Aubrey Plaza’s MG, and her role as a supportive sister and aunt to Kristen Connolly and Talia Ryder’s characters respectively.

With Honey Don’t now playing in theaters nationwide, Qualley joined me for a Collider Ladies Night chat during which we revisited her days as a dancer, including what prompted the switch to focus on acting. She also looks back on memorable lessons learned making The Leftovers and The Nice Guys, considers how working on The Substance changed her, and talked about her top-tier scene partners in Honey Don’t.

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Back in April 2024, I was lucky enough to visit the set of Noah Hawley’s Alien: Earth in Thailand where I played detective with stars Samuel Blenkin and Alex Lawther. At the start of our three-day visit, we knew little about where Hawley and co. were taking the iconic franchise, so my one-on-one chats with Blenkin and Lawther were all about trying to figure out who their characters are, how they fit into this situation, and what they want out of it. A little over a year later, we reunited at San Diego Comic-Con for another chat where the duo built upon what we discussed in Bangkok and dug into some of what we see unfold in the first three episodes of the series.

Alien: Earth takes place in the year 2120, two years before the events of the first film. Blenkin’s Boy Kavalier created one of the five companies that run the planet, Prodigy Corporation. Considered a “boy genius,” Boy K created the program that gives us Wendy, Sydney Chandler’s character, the first synthetic to be infused with human consciousness. Her brother, Lawther’s Hermit, has no idea she’s undergone such a procedure, so when the two reunite and he realizes who she is, it’s a mighty complex situation, to say the least.

With the first three episodes of Alien: Earth now available to watch, it’s time to release my conversation with Blenkin and Lawther filmed at SDCC in FX’s podcast studio created in partnership with Press Play: Creatives and At Will Media. In true Collider Forces fashion, we carved out time to discuss their journeys on the stage and screen, and pivotal experiences of honing their crafts as actors, and then veered into Alien: Earth territory where Blenkin and Lawther dug into key scene partners, character motivations, and deleted scenes.

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Few actors kick off their careers with productions as big as the opportunities Hermione Corfield secured early on. One of her first feature film credits is Mission: Impossible - Rogue Nation in which she shares a key scene with Tom Cruise, and soon after came xXx: Return of Xander Cage, and Star Wars: Episode VIII - The Last Jedi. After that, it was the indie crime thriller Rust Creek which earned Corfield a couple of film festivals honors, and then it was the movie that quite firmly solidified her as a must-follow actor for yours truly, the eco-horror movie Sea Fever in which she stars opposite Connie Nielsen and Dougray Scott. Ever since our TIFF 2019 chat for that film, Corfield’s been a prime target for Collider Ladies Night and now, with the debut of the Outlander prequel series, Outlander: Blood of My Blood, the time has finally come.

The new Starz show puts the spotlight on Jamie Fraser (Sam Heughan) and Claire Beauchamp’s (Caitríona Balfe) parents. For Jamie, it’s Jamie Roy’s Brian Fraser and Harriet Slater’s Ellen MacKenzie, and Claire's parents, Henry Beauchamp and Julia Moriston, are played by Jeremy Irvine and Corfield. Whereas Brian and Ellen’s romance starts and remains in the same time period, Henry and Julia experience a significant upheaval when, similar to their daughter, they travel from 1917 to 1714, crossing paths with Brian and Ellen.

Soon after a brief chat with Corfield and much of the main ensemble at San Diego Comic-Con, Corfield swung by the Collider Ladies Night studio for an extended conversation about the first two episodes of Season 1, and to offer up a few teases of what’s to come.

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