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Barbiemania! Margot Robbie Opens Up About the Movie Everyone’s Waiting For

Barbiemania! Margot Robbie Opens Up About the Movie Everyone’s Waiting For

Margot Robbie wasn’t a Barbie fanatic as a child. She’s not even sure she owned a Barbie. “I don’t think I did,” she tells me one morning over breakfast in Venice Beach. “I know my cousin had a bunch of Barbies, and I’d go to her house.” Growing up on Australia’s Gold Coast, Robbie spent a lot of time outside. She and her cousin would make mud pies. They’d play with trucks. And they’d play with Barbies. Mostly they’d build forts, “cubbies” to an Australian. “Building cubbies was what we did all day, every day.”
We are a couple of blocks from the Venice boardwalk, at Great White, an Australian-​owned restaurant, and I have asked Robbie what compelled her to produce and star in a live-​action Barbie movie, due out this July. “It wasn’t that I ever wanted to play Barbie, or dreamt of being Barbie, or anything like that,” the 32-​year-old actor says. “This is going to sound stupid, but I really didn’t even think about playing Barbie until years into developing the project.”

It doesn’t sound stupid but it does seem counterintuitive, the notion that Robbie, whose breakout role in The Wolf of Wall Street was described in that movie’s script as “the hottest blonde ever,” was not envisioning herself in the role of Barbie when she sought the film rights from Mattel. And yet the person sitting across the table is not giving blonde bombshell. Not in a conventional sense, anyway.
It doesn’t sound stupid but it does seem counterintuitive, the notion that Robbie, whose breakout role in The Wolf of Wall Street was described in that movie’s script as “the hottest blonde ever,” was not envisioning herself in the role of Barbie when she sought the film rights from Mattel. And yet the person sitting across the table is not giving blonde bombshell. Not in a conventional sense, anyway.
Between bites of avocado toast, grilled Halloumi cheese, and Australian-​​style bacon—“Crisp it up,” she tells the waiter—Robbie delivers the Barbie backstory with Glengarry Glen Ross–esque speed. There were previous attempts to make a Barbie movie. Amy Schumer was attached at one point. So was Anne Hathaway. Those projects never got off the ground. Robbie kept tabs on the status. As a producer, she saw huge potential in the Barbie IP. “The word itself is more globally recognized than practically everything else other than Coca-Cola.”

In 2018, Robbie sensed an opening. So she had a meeting with the new CEO of Mattel, Ynon Kreiz, at the Polo Lounge. That meeting was about pitching LuckyChap, the production outfit she runs with her friend Josey McNamara and her husband, Tom Ackerley, to Mattel. “We’re LuckyChap,” she says. “This is our company. This is what we do. This is what we stand for. This is why we should be the ones to make a Barbie movie. And this is how we’d go about it.”

LuckyChap didn’t have a specific concept in mind, but they did know this much. “We of course would want to honor the 60-year legacy that this brand has,” Robbie says. “But we have to acknowledge that there are a lot of people who aren’t fans of Barbie. And in fact, aren’t just indifferent to Barbie. They actively hate Barbie. And have a real issue with Barbie. We need to find a way to acknowledge that.”

There were bigger meetings with Mattel, and then meetings with Warner Bros., where LuckyChap had a first-look deal at the time. Eventually Robbie started talking to Greta Gerwig about writing and directing. “I was very scared it was going to be a no,” Robbie says. “At the time this was such a terrifying thing to take on. People were like, You’re going to do what?” But Gerwig said yes, on the condition that she could write the script with her partner, Noah Baumbach. “It felt sparky to me in some way that felt kind of promising,” Gerwig tells me later. “I was the one who said, Noah and I will do this.” (Baumbach: “She broke the news to me after we were already doing it.”)
LuckyChap wanted Gerwig and Baumbach to have full creative freedom. “At the same time,” Robbie says, “we’ve got two very nervous ginormous companies, Warner Bros. and Mattel, being like: What’s their plan? What are they going to do? What’s it gonna be about? What’s she going to say? They have a bazillion questions.” In the end LuckyChap found a way to structure a deal so that Gerwig and Baumbach would be left alone to write what they wanted, “which was really fucking hard to do.”

Gerwig and Baumbach did share a treatment, Robbie adds: “Greta wrote an abstract poem about Barbie. And when I say ‘abstract,’ I mean it was super abstract.” (Gerwig declines to read me the poem but offers that it “shares some similarities with the Apostles’ Creed.”) No one at Lucky­Chap, Mattel, or Warner Bros. saw any pages of the script until it was finished.

When I ask Gerwig and Baumbach to describe their Barbie writing process, the words “open” and “free” get used a lot. The project seemed “wide open,” Gerwig tells me. “There really was this kind of open, free road that we could keep building,” Baumbach says. Part of it had to do with the fact that their characters were dolls. “It’s like you’re playing with dolls when you’re writing something, and in this case, of course, there was this extra layer in that they were dolls,” Baumbach says. “It was literally imaginative play,” Gerwig says. That they were writing the script during lockdown also mattered, Baumbach says. “We were in the pandemic, and everybody had the feeling of, Who knows what the world is going to look like. That fueled it as well. That feeling of: Well, here goes nothing.”

Robbie and Ackerley read the Barbie script at the same time. A certain joke on page one sent their jaws to the floor. “We just looked at each other, pure panic on our faces,” Robbie recalls. “We were like, Holy fucking shit.” When Robbie finished reading: “I think the first thing I said to Tom was, This is so genius. It is such a shame that we’re never going to be able to make this movie.”

LuckyChap did make the movie, of course, and it’s very much the one Gerwig and Baumbach wrote. (Alas, that joke on page one is gone.) If you saw the trailer released in December, you’ve seen the opening of the film. It’s a parody of the Dawn of Man sequence from 2001: A Space Odyssey. But instead of apes discovering tools in the presence of a monolith, little girls smash their baby dolls in the presence of a gigantic Barbie. Robbie-​as-​Barbie appears in a retro black-and-white bathing suit and towering heels. She slowly lowers a pair of white cat-eye sunglasses and winks.

I saw more of the movie one morning at the Warner Bros. lot. After the Kubrick spoof we go on a romp through Barbieland, “a mad fantasy of gorgeousness,” as Sarah Greenwood, the film’s set designer, puts it later. Barbie wakes up in her Dreamhouse and embarks on the Perfect Day, accompanied by an original song that serves as soundtrack. (I am not allowed to say who sings it.) Everything everywhere is infused with pink. “I’ve never done such a deep dive into pink in all my days,” Greenwood says. Barbie’s perfectly fake, color-​saturated world retains many of the quirks and physical limitations of the toy version. Her environment isn’t always three-dimensional, and the scale of everything is a bit off. Barbie is a little too big for her house and her car. When she takes a shower, there is no water. Her bare feet remain arched.
The swimsuit Robbie wears in the Dawn of Woman sequence is a replica of the one worn by the first Barbie doll in 1959. Over the course of the Perfect Day, Barbie changes clothes constantly. The progression—poodle skirt, disco look—amounts to a survey of Barbie fashion over time, says Jacqueline Durran, the film’s costume designer. (Wisely, the survey does not include the more retrograde outfits in Barbie’s past, such as the Slumber Party ensemble of 1965, which came with a little bathroom scale set at 110 pounds and a book titled How to Lose Weight that advised: “Don’t eat.”)

“The key thing about Barbie is that she dresses with intention,” Durran tells me. “Barbie doesn’t dress for the day. She dresses for the task.” The task might involve a leisure activity, or a form of employment. One scene pokes fun at the way the Barbie universe seems to blur such distinctions. “My job is just beach,” Ken explains.

Ken is played with daft aplomb by Ryan Gosling. “The greatest version of Ryan Gosling ever put on screen,” in Robbie’s estimation. (Gosling: “Ken wasn’t really on my bucket list. But in fairness, I don’t have a bucket list. So I thought I’d give it a shot.”) In Barbieland, Ken is basically another fashion accessory. “Barbie has a great day every day,” we are told in voiceover delivered by Helen Mirren. “Ken only has a great day if Barbie looks at him.” Mattel introduced the first Ken doll in 1961, in response to letters demanding Barbie get a boyfriend. “Barbie was invented first,” Gerwig points out. “Ken was invented after Barbie, to burnish Barbie’s position in our eyes and in the world. That kind of creation myth is the opposite of the creation myth in Genesis.”

Just as Barbie was given big boobs but no nipples, Ken was given a smooth “bulge,” as Mattel referred to it at the time. Together, their peculiar partial anatomy hints at a world of grown-up things hidden from view. Gerwig: “You feel that there’s something there, which is part of the allure. It’s unclear how this all kinda works. But it’s not without intrigue.” This vague sense of mystery is captured in a comical exchange Ken and Barbie have in front of her Dreamhouse. “I thought I might stay over tonight,” Ken says. “Why?” Barbie asks. “Because we’re girlfriend-​boyfriend,” Ken says. “To do what?” Barbie asks. “I’m actually not sure,” Ken says.

Barbie acquired friends over the years. First came Midge, her longtime best friend, and later Christie, one of her first Black friends. (Mattel didn’t introduce a Black Barbie until 1980, and a forthcoming documentary, Black Barbie, explores this legacy.) When Gerwig took a tour of Mattel, she learned that the vast majority of dolls in its Barbie line are named Barbie. “Now all of the dolls are Barbie. All of them are Barbie, and Barbie is everyone. Philosophically, I was like, Well, now that’s interesting.” The more she thought about it, the more the multiplicity of Barbies suggested “an expansive idea of self that we could all learn from.”

During the casting process, Gerwig and Robbie looked for “Barbie energy,” a certain ineffable combination of beauty and exuberance they concluded is embodied in Gal Gadot. Robbie: “Gal Gadot is Barbie energy. Because Gal Gadot is so impossibly beautiful, but you don’t hate her for being that beautiful, because she’s so genuinely sincere, and she’s so enthusiastically kind, that it’s almost dorky. It’s like right before being a dork.” (Gadot wasn’t available.) They found their Barbies in Issa Rae, Hari Nef, Emma Mackey, Dua Lipa, Sharon Rooney, Ana Cruz Kayne, Alexandra Shipp, Kate McKinnon, and others. (There are multiple Kens too.) In this menagerie, Rae is President Barbie. Robbie is Stereotypical Barbie.

Before shooting began in London, Gerwig threw a slumber party for the Barbies at Claridge’s Hotel. The Kens were invited to stop by, but not to sleep over. (Gosling couldn’t make it, so he sent a singing telegram in the form of an older Scottish man in a kilt who played bagpipes and delivered the speech from Braveheart.) Once production was underway, LuckyChap hosted weekly movie screenings at the Electric Cinema in Notting Hill. Every Sunday morning, cast and crew were invited to watch a movie that served as a reference for Barbie. They called this “movie church.”

Gerwig had a sense that Barbie was being guided by old soundstage Technicolor musicals, so they watched a bunch of those, most helpfully The Red Shoes and The Umbrellas of Cherbourg. “They have such a high level of what we came to call authentic artificiality,” Gerwig says. “You have a painted sky in a soundstage. Which is an illusion, but it’s also really there. The painted backdrop is really there. The tangibility of the artifice is something that we kept going back to.” Her director of photography, Rodrigo Prieto, who shot The Wolf of Wall Street and Babel and Argo and Brokeback Mountain, created a special color template for Barbie with this in mind. Gerwig named it Techni-Barbie.
Every protagonist must go on a hero’s journey, and Stereotypical Barbie is no exception. The first sign of trouble arises during a group dance number. Breezing through the choreography at the front of the pack, she suddenly turns to the other Barbies and asks: “Do you guys ever think about dying?” Later she wakes up and finds her feet are no longer arched. “I have no context for this but my heels are on the ground,” she says. “You’re malfunctioning,” another Barbie tells her.
Eventually Stereotypical Barbie goes to the “real world.” I don’t know why she is called to this particular adventure, because I was allowed to watch only the first 20 minutes of the movie, and then, skipping ahead, her first few moments in the other world. I do know that Ken goes with her. If you saw the images of Robbie and Gosling Rollerblading on the Venice boardwalk last summer in head-to-toe neon—the photos that sparked a hot-pink #Barbiecore trend on TikTok and on actual runways—you’ve caught a glimpse of Barbie and Ken’s alien landing.

After breakfast, Robbie and I skate over to the boardwalk. As expected, Robbie is completely at ease on roller skates. She took it up after she did a bunch of the ice-skating in I, Tonya, LuckyChap’s biopic about Tonya Harding, and that’s why she doesn’t like brakes. “I never had them on ice skates, so it would mess me up.”
We pass the spot where she shot the real-world scenes last year, then pause at the skate-dance park and watch the roller-dancers twirl. “I’ve been in there once,” Robbie says when I ask. “On Babylon, one of the background extras, she’s like a really cool Instagram skater, and we were talking about skating. I was like, Do you want to go on the weekend and teach me some tricks? And she was like, Yeah, sure. So we went and she was kind of teaching me how to dance on my skates.”

Over the course of the day, I repeatedly ask Robbie how she found her character as Barbie. Later, through interviews with the rest of the cast, I begin to grasp that, in an ensemble piece of this scale, no character exists apart from the others. As Ana Cruz Kayne explains, it’s about finding one’s space within the group: “Like the youngest child asks at Passover, What makes this night different than other nights? It’s like, What makes this Barbie different than other Barbies?”

Hari Nef made a private decision about who owns her Barbie. “A doll collector,” Nef tells me. “A gay man in his 50s who lives in a rent-controlled apartment in the West Village.” She took this cue from her costumes. “I was given the most over-the-top, fashion-y, crazy costumes. And I was like, This is no child’s doll.” Also, her Barbie seemed well-preserved. “I feel like every week he has his two or three friends over, maybe he’s a little lonely, and he shows them my new outfit. And I just kind of stay in my box.”

Gosling deflects when I ask how he found his character—“It would be very un-Ken of me to talk about Ken”—but he does say that Robbie did things to help. “She left a pink present with a pink bow, from Barbie to Ken, every day while we were filming. They were all beach-related. Like puka shells, or a sign that says ‘Pray for surf.’ Because Ken’s job is just beach. I’ve never quite figured out what that means. But I felt like she was trying to help Ken understand, through these gifts that she was giving.”
Stereotypical Barbie was a tough nut to crack. Usually Robbie finds something called “animal work” helpful. Tonya was a pit bull in life and a mustang on the ice. Nellie, Robbie’s character in Babylon, was an octopus and a honey badger. An octopus because they are survivalists; they have a lot of nerve endings; there’s a fluidity to them; and they change their appearance. A honey badger because they have square backs and thick skin. “They’re such an insane animal,” Robbie says. “You can hit a honey badger with a machete.” With Barbie, animal work wasn’t useful. Robbie tried a flamingo but didn’t get anywhere. At one point she was really struggling. “I was like, Greta, I need to go on this whole character journey. And Greta was like, Oh, I have a really good podcast for you.” Gerwig sent Robbie an episode of This American Life, about a woman who doesn’t introspect. “You know how you have a voice in your head all the time?” Robbie says. “This woman, she doesn’t have that voice in her head.”

To sort out the sexiness question, Robbie had to break it down. “I’m like, Okay, she’s a doll. She’s a plastic doll. She doesn’t have organs. If she doesn’t have organs, she doesn’t have reproductive organs. If she doesn’t have reproductive organs, would she even feel sexual desire? No, I don’t think she could.” Therefore: “She is sexualized. But she should never be sexy. People can project sex onto her.” Thus: “Yes, she can wear a short skirt, but because it’s fun and pink. Not because she wanted you to see her butt.”

I do glean a few details about the rest of Barbie. The arc is partially inspired by something Gerwig read when she was a kid, in the 1994 bestseller Reviving Ophelia. “My mom would check out books from the library about parenting, and then I would read them,” Gerwig says. The book describes an abrupt change that happens in American girls when they hit adolescence and begin to bend to external expectations. “They’re funny and brash and confident, and then they just—stop,” Gerwig says. This memory bubbled up early in the writing and Gerwig found it “jarring,” the realization that this is where the story had to go: “How is this journey the same thing that a teenage girl feels? All of a sudden, she thinks, Oh, I’m not good enough.”
There’s a completely different color template for the real world, Prieto mentions when we speak. Techni-​Barbie is only for Barbie’s world. “We wanted to create a distinctive look for Barbie, for her world, as opposed to the real world,” Prieto says.

Also, Robbie’s speech patterns change. She brings this up when describing Barbie’s non-accent. (Barbie shouldn’t sound like she’s from anywhere in particular, therefore: “General American accent. It’s called GenAm.”) At the start of the movie, Barbie speaks in a higher register, and: “Everything is very definite. There’s no second thought. There’s no hesitation.” Later, her voice lowers, and there are more pauses.

Something major seems to happen to the Kens. When I ask Gerwig how she and Robbie defined Ken energy, she cannot formulate a response without laughing. “The Kens have a journey in front of them,” she eventually says. “In the beginning of the movie, nobody thinks about Ken. Nobody worries about Ken. Ken doesn’t have a house. Or a car. Or a job. Or any power. And, um, that is gonna be sort of unsustainable.”

New characters are introduced in the real world. One is the CEO of Mattel, played by Will Ferrell. Robbie describes this character as: “Misguided but in an innocent way. He just cares about little girls and their dreams in the least creepy way possible.” Another is Gloria, played by America Ferrera. It’s unclear who Gloria is, but she’s definitely not a Barbie. “I think I can say that my character has a very strong connection with Barbie,” Ferrera tells me. In the pictures that went viral from the Venice shoot, there are some of Robbie and Ferrera Rollerblading side by side, holding hands. Robbie is in a pink denim cowgirl outfit.
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Margot Robbie Talks Acting, Producing & Rewriting ‘Wolf Of Wall Street’ Scenes With Scorsese: “The Crazier You Are, The More Marty Will Like It”

Margot Robbie Talks Acting, Producing & Rewriting ‘Wolf Of Wall Street’ Scenes With Scorsese: “The Crazier You Are, The More Marty Will Like It”

Margot Robbie dug into some of the biggest moments of her career in a rare onstage appearance as the latest subject of BAFTA’s popular A Life In Pictures series Tuesday.

The session was lengthy and wide-ranging, but off the bat, Robbie was asked about her experience shooting her breakout Hollywood role in Martin Scorsese’s 2013 film The Wolf of Wall Street and she told the audience that she also partly served as a writer on the Oscar-nominated flick.

Robbie said the fraught scene near the middle of the film where her character Naomi Lapaglia chases down an intoxicated Jordan Belfort (Leonardo DiCaprio) only for him to crash a car with their daughter inside was not originally in the script.
“What happened previously in the script was that I walked into his office and said I want a divorce. And that was it,” Robbie said.

Robbie said the night before shooting the scene, she, Scorsese, and DiCaprio went over the script and felt that they were missing a moment that would tie the sequence together, so they returned to Belfort’s biography for inspiration.

“We started riffing, and we locked ourselves in a room until like three in the morning and came up with all of that. And the sex scene that comes before that,” she said. “Our brilliant 1st AD Adam Somner was probably tearing his hair out because out of nowhere we were like, so, we’re gonna need to break the garage door of someone’s house, break a car window, and destroy a couch.”

When asked whether she found it intimidating as a then-22-year-old actor to offer notes on a Scorsese script, Robbie said the Mean Streets director had created an environment where experimentation was encouraged.

“We were a couple of months into the shoot at that point. The tone had been set that it was a bit of a free for all,” she said. “It was like the crazier you are, the more Marty will like it. And the more screen time you’re going to get.”

Later Robbie said Scorsese only gave her one piece of direction throughout the entire six-month shoot. The rest of the time, she said, was spent chatting with the director and sharing stories.

“We spoke all the time. I’d sit at video village, and he would tell stories about the Mafia and old film stars, but he didn’t actually give direction,” she said.

However, Robbie said one thing Scorsese told her during the shoot has stuck with her ever since, and it surprisingly had very little to do with acting.

“We were shooting the shot where I’m running up the stairs, and he turns to me and goes, ‘Every great movie has a stair shot.’ I’ve told so many directors since that Martin Scorsese says every great movie has a stairwell shot, so get the stairs in there,” she said.

Elsewhere during the session, Robbie spoke about her shift into producing films. Her first producing credit was 2017’s I, Tonya, a film that she told the audience also gave her the confidence to write a letter to Quentin Tarantino in hopes of finding a project to collaborate on.

“I, Tonya was the first time I watched a movie and thought I’m a good actor. And I thought, ‘Okay, I’m ready to reach out to my idols.’ And that’s when I wrote the letter to Quentin,” she said.

Robbie, of course, went on to star in Tarantino’s 2019 flick Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood. While discussing the film, Robbie pushed back against criticism the film garnered upon its release for the limited screen time given to her portrayal of Sharon Tate.

“It didn’t bother me. I watched it and thought we got across what we wanted to get across,” she said.

Robbie next returns to the world of golden age Hollywood in Damien Chazelle’s long-awaited Hollywood epic Babylon, and the audience at BAFTA was given a short preview of Robbie’s performance in the film.

Babylon is billed as an original epic set in 1920s Los Angeles as Tinseltown makes the transition from silent films to talkies. The scene projected at BAFTA features Robbie as an actress performing a sequence on a raucous set alongside Chazelle’s wife, Olivia Hamilton, who has a brief on-screen role.

Discussing working with Chazelle, Robbie said: “He’s brilliant. For someone as young as him to have the breadth of knowledge he has and to be such an insanely good director is just really exciting. I loved every single day on that set.”

Before wrapping up the session, Robbie was asked about the much-talked-about Barbie film she is producing and starring in alongside Ryan Gosling. Greta Gerwig is directing from a screenplay she wrote with Noah Baumbach.

“I didn’t know it would have quite the hype it seems to have already,” Robbie said of the film. “I remember when we were trying to set this up, I kept saying to these boards of people that this is the most recognizable word next to coca cola. Everyone knows Barbie. This will hit, so give us more money for our budget.”

Ending the discussion, Robbie, who is the youngest subject of BAFTA’s A Life In Pictures series, said the one director she still wants to work with is Licorice Pizza auteur Paul Thomas Anderson.

“PTA, I really love Paul Thomas Anderson,” she said.
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Margot Robbie Didn’t Feel Like “a Good Actor” Until I, Tonya

Margot Robbie Didn’t Feel Like “a Good Actor” Until I, Tonya

While becoming the youngest-ever recipient of the “BAFTA: A Life in Pictures” tribute, The Babylon star revealed that she wasn’t fully confident in her skills as an actress until she played Tonya Harding.

It took Margot Robbie a while to recognize her own star power. The Babylon star made history on Tuesday when she became the youngest actor to ever be given the special “BAFTA: A Life in Pictures” tribute. Usually reserved for filmmakers with decades-long careers, “BAFTA: A Life in Pictures” recognized Robbie for her immense contributions to film in a relatively short time, spanning back to her breakthrough year in 2013 when she first burst onto the scene, starring in The Wolf of Wall Street and About Time and highlighting her work as a producer as well via her production company LuckyChap Productions.

At the ceremony held at BAFTAs headquarters in London, Robbie said that she didn’t feel confident in her work as an actress until 2017’s I, Tonya, where she played vengeful Olympic figure skating hopeful Tonya Harding and earned her first Oscar nomination. “I, Tonya was the first time I watched a movie and went, ‘OK, I’m a good actor’,” she said. It was that confidence that led her to reach out to her idol Quentin Tarantino, she told the audience, noting that working with the Pulp Fiction director was “a bucket list thing for me.” Her moxie was rewarded and ultimately led to Robbie starring in Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood as Sharon Tate.
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Margot Robbie Is Nobody’s Barbie: The Babylon Star on Navigating Hollywood

Margot Robbie Is Nobody’s Barbie: The Babylon Star on Navigating Hollywood

“The highs are really high and the lows are really, really low.”

Margot Robbie wants to take me to New York. We’re on the Paramount lot in Los Angeles, and she’s giving me a walking tour of some places they shot Babylon, her upcoming movie about the vertiginous swirl that was Hollywood in the late 1920s. We’re about to enter the New York back lot—faux neighborhoods used as stand-ins for various cities—when a security guard stops us with an “Excuse me, where are you heading?”

We try saying “that way” and walk like we own the place. The guard isn’t buying it. He asks what production we’re with. This is where I expect my tour guide to say, “I’m Margot Robbie.” Instead, she mumbles something about being with Babylon and “doing some post.” Then her voice trails off. The security guard clearly doesn’t recognize that standing in front of him is the Australian actor who brought Harley Quinn to life and was nominated for an Oscar for playing Tonya Harding. He tells us we have to get off the set because somebody’s shooting. Robbie politely agrees. She laughs as we round the corner. “I should have a better cover story,” she says. “You’d think I’d be better at that.”

“Margot is completely grounded and instantly commanding,” says Martin Scorsese. “She enters the frame and you pay attention to her.”
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Margot Robbie Is a Force of Change in Hollywood

Margot Robbie Is a Force of Change in Hollywood

As both an actor and producer, Robbie and her production company, LuckyChap Entertainment (whose projects range from ‘I,Tonya’ to ‘Barbie’), have put telling female stories first.

The hottest blonde ever.” This was the infamous script description given for Margot Robbie’s character in The Wolf of Wall Street (2013), directed by Martin Scorsese. Widely credited as Robbie’s breakthrough, the role instantly helped establish her as one of the biggest movie stars.

Yet Robbie—Australian born and then still relatively new to Hollywood—says that she had little interest in further riffing on the blonde-bombshell theme: “I was going to have to show people that I could do something different. I didn’t want to get pigeonholed.” Accordingly, her next roles gave the middle finger to the hot-blonde paradigm.

On Suite Française’s set, in 2013, “I play a French peasant, and trust me, I looked revolting,” she says via Zoom. (Her screen name reads “Maggot,” her childhood nickname, rather than “Margot.”) “Then I did Z for Zachariah…and again, I looked revolting. By that time, I thought, I’ve shown people.” As the smallpox-riddled Queen Elizabeth in 2018’s Mary Queen of Scots, Robbie was adorned with oozing sores, scabs and scars.

While filming Suite Française, Robbie made friends with assistant directors Josey McNamara and Tom Ackerley. Both became her business partners, along with her childhood friend Sophia Kerr; she later married Ackerley. The four discussed their mutual producing aspirations, and about what they saw as a lack of desirable film roles for women. “I remember saying, ‘Every time I pick up a script, I want to play the guy,’ ” Robbie recalls. “ ‘Wouldn’t it be so cool if people pick up scripts that we’re making and always wanted to play the female role?’ ”
They decided to found their own production company, calling it LuckyChap Entertainment. Robbie had just turned 24. (The company name was conjured while they were drunk, says Robbie; it may refer to Charlie Chaplin, but no one can really remember.) The LuckyChap mandate, from day one, was to “make female stories.” Each of its projects had to involve a female story or female storyteller. They also, says Ackerley, “wanted to find the next generation of talent,” while being “on the right side of culture.”
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