Meet the Man Behind Margaret Qualley’s Insane Dance Solo in the New Kenzo Commercial

Kenzo has changed the perfume campaign game. At least, that was the online consensus this week, after creative directors Carol Lim and Humberto Leon dropped a four-minute Spike Jonze–lensed film for Kenzo World, their first fragrance for the French fashion house. The offering read more art-house short than commercial—touching on the bold floral scent and sculptural evil-eye bottle only in abstract. At a black-tie event in downtown Los Angeles, starlet Margaret Qualley appears as a woman unleashed, breaking loose in an emerald jewel of a dress to romp through the nearly abandoned pavilion in frenetic dance—limbs convulsing, knees rocking back and forth wildly.

Those theatrical moves come courtesy of Ryan Heffington, the choreographer best known for his equally subversive work with Sia (this is the first time he has collaborated with Jonze). “He’s incredible,” Heffington says of the Being John Malkovich and Her director. There were only a few days of prepping and workshopping a “movement vocabulary,” as Heffington calls it, combining Jonze’s highly conceptual ideas with the 21-year-old actress’s own balletic training. “She was incredibly gung ho to fall off stages and run up stairs in heels—super athletic,” he adds.

Given the freewheeling spirit of the performance, much of the choreography was improvised on set by Qualley, while Jonze and Heffington looked on—the particularly surrealist sequence where she interacts with a sculpted bust, that was all her. “A couple times, Spike would just say, ‘let’s have her improv,’ and she would kill it,” Heffington says. It should come as no surprise that the artist’s loose, expressive style is now in very high demand. “Too many to list!” he says, laughing, when asked what he has in the works. He does reveal that a new Sia video is set to debut next week, where more of his absurdist side will no doubt be on view. “She always encourages me to go to the strange,” he says. “She really lets me express myself and my weird.” It makes sense—weird is wonderful, after all.

 

 

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