Margaret Qualley Awkwardly Responds to Taylor Swift Question

Margaret Qualley seemed a bit confused as to why she was being asked about Taylor Swift’s new album, The Life of a Showgirl, in a recent interview.

During an appearance on the Today Show on Wednesday, August 13, Qualley, 30 — who’s friends with Swift, 35, and married to her longtime collaborator Jack Antonoff — shut down a question about the pop star’s 12th album.

Today host Craig Melvin asked Qualley if she could “tell us anything” about the new music, to which the Honey Don’t actress awkwardly responded, “I don’t know anything, but we’ll all be excited to listen to the music.”

“Ok. All right,” Melvin, 46, quipped before Qualley shyly smiled, laughed and shook her head, stating, “OK.”

Antonoff, 41, and Qualley tied the knot in New Jersey in August 2023 in front of a star-studded crowd, which included Swift, Channing Tatum, Zoë Kravitz, Cara Delevingne and Lana Del Rey.

“I spent so many years trying to be someone’s perfect girl, and that girl changed over and over again,” Qualley gushed of Antonoff in Cosmopolitan’s Fall 2025 issue. “But I can’t lie to Jack. I can’t be that for him — he’d see through it. So I just have to be myself. He’s been the person I’ve pictured my whole life. And I’m not even saying that metaphorically.”

Antonoff famously coproduced a number of Swift’s albums, including 1989, Reputation, Lover, Folklore, Evermore, Midnights and The Tortured Poets Department.

It was speculated, however, that he did not work on “The Life of a Showgirl” after a Spotify playlist Swift posted on Monday, August 11, notably listed tracks only produced by Max Martin and Shellback. Titled “And, baby, that’s show business for you,” which is predicted to be a lyric from the new record, the 22-song collection contained hits off Swift’s albums Red, 1989 and Reputation, with none being produced by Antonoff.

Although Swift has worked almost exclusively with Antonoff and Aaron Dessner for the last eight years, it appears she may be switching things up or perhaps returning to her synth-pop era.

In September 2024, Antonoff opened up about his connection to Swift and how they “just have [their] own language.”

“Most of the time when we work it’s just her and I in a room, usually my apartment or Electric Lady [Studios],” he told Grammy.com. “To see [the songs] in literally the biggest spaces and retain all of [their] importance and soul and feeling like it’s that for every single person in that crowd, it’s like the absolute coolest. She’s the absolute greatest of all time, with a never-ending hunger to push forward.”

He added of her lyrics and use of poetic lines and literary references: “I think that tendency is just inherent in both of us. But I think the concept of pop structure is whatever the hell we want it to be. The worst of pop music is ambulance-chasing. The real inspiration is to be your own loud light-up machine shooting down the street.”

Antonoff, who produces his own music with Bleachers as well as works with the likes of Sabrina Carpenter and Florence Welch, also said pop music is “whatever the hell the person making it says it is, and then everyone else gets to argue if it is or isn’t.”

“I don’t sit around and think about genre, placement, or who they’re going to satisfy,” he continued. “All those thoughts are not just the death of making things. It’s pretty easy for me to only consider that gut feeling. I’m just fascinated by how people hear things. There’s no genre of music that I think is better or worse than any other one.”

Antonoff has accompanied Swift to every Grammy awards show since the success of 1989 in 2016, with the pair often caught doing their signature secret handshake on stage.

“Sometimes he sits at the piano and we both just start ad-libbing and the song seems to create itself,” Swift said of the producer for a New York Times profile in 2017. “His excitement and exuberance about writing songs is contagious. He’s an absolute joy. That’s why everyone loves him. I personally wouldn’t trust someone who didn’t.”