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

When I meet her, Robbie has just finished the David O. Russell press tour amsterdam, an offbeat film set in the 1930s in which she stars alongside Christian Bale and John David Washington. Russell is known for his, shall we say, intense nature on the set. For starters, he made Amy Adams cry by doing american hustle and shouted profanely at Lily Tomlin on the set of I Heart Huckabees in a video so gruesome it’s now become legend. I ask if Robbie was worried about working with him, especially in this “new” Hollywood where, ideally, toxic behavior is not tolerated. “The process with David started years ago,” she says, adding that they created his character together. “One conversation led to another conversation led to another conversation that went on for years and years. So it wasn’t like a ‘Do you want to sign up for a David O. Russell movie?’ moment. She enjoyed the brainstorming, she says, “I’ve never been more involved than as an actress. Never has a director wanted to hear my point of view so much in the development process.

I ask if the set has ever been uncomfortable. She shakes her head no. “I had a pretty amazing experience,” she says. “The other thing I wish people understood is that when you make a movie, you don’t just do it with a director and actors. You make a movie with so many people. It distinguishes the director of Oscar-winning photography Emmanuel “Chivo” Lubezki and says working with him has been one of the “absolute highlights” of his career.

As we speak, Robbie is open and giving, often wandering into passionate stories about her on-set experiences or her favorite movies or podcasts (she likes The Deakins Team, a filmmaking podcast featuring cinematographer Roger Deakins and his wife, James Ellis Deakins). She is more cautious when it comes to her personal life. “It’s so ironic,” she said. “When you’re an actor, the goal is to show people other people, so it’s so counterintuitive to talk about yourself when you’re spending all this time hiding.

Yet she seems to be hiding nothing more than human decency (she paid off her mother’s mortgage with her first big paycheck) and a penchant for hanging out with friends (she takes surfer girls to Nicaragua and group holidays in Spain) . A few more details that suggest we’re dealing with a real 3D person here: Robbie can open a beer bottle with another beer bottle. She wants to learn to play the banjo. She threw a the island of love– themed birthday party. “She really likes the island of love, which is surprising just because she’s so classy,” Hodson says. “But yeah, it’s definitely a guilty pleasure that we waste many, many hours on.”

Dress by Loewe. Photograph by Mario Sorrenti. Stylized by Anastasia Barbieri.

At one point, Robbie says she wished she had been an actress in the 1920s or even the 1970s. But she was able to play a variety of roles – getting boils on her face to play Queen Elizabeth I in Mary Queen of Scots, wearing ice skates and a padded bodysuit for Tonya Harding, and employing garish face paint and a baseball bat for Harley Quinn, all while producing the kind of projects she dreamed of. Clara Bow could only play one type of character and had little control over her career – which I can say for sure wouldn’t sit well with Robbie. She pulls out another notebook and reads Walt Whitman: “Am I contradicting myself? Alright then I contradict myself. I’m tall. I contain multitudes. She looks up and smiles. “‘I contain multitudes’ is a cool thing to remember.”

Hollywood did not expect it to contain multitudes. When she made herself known after The wolf of Wall Street at age 22, Robbie was offered the predictable hot blonde roles, all of which she turned down. I tell her that Hollywood loves to put ingenues in a box, and she goes further: “I think people likes to put people in boxes. Even now, Robbie doesn’t get enough credit for her work as a producer. In 2014, she founded LuckyChap Entertainment with three of her closest friends – one of them, Tom Ackerley, who became her husband in 2016. The company’s first release was in 2017. Me Tonya a critical success that earned three Oscar nominations and a win for Janney. In 2021, Promising young woman earned five more Oscar nominations and a screenplay win for Emerald Fennell. The company, which champions female stories and storytellers, produced five films this year, including Fennell’s upcoming film.

And then there is Barbie. The film was essentially dead after going through the main cast (Amy Schumer and Anne Hathaway) and writers until Robbie signed on to star and produce. She brought in Greta Gerwig to co-write (with her partner, Noah Baumbach) and direct, aiming for a subversive take on the world’s most iconic doll. “Making an obvious Barbie movie would have been extremely easy to do,” Robbie says, “and anything easy to do probably isn’t worth doing.” Gerwig was impressed with Robbie to the point of being stunned: “Once I wanted to capture Margot in slow motion but have everything else moving fast, so I walked up to her and said, ‘Could you move at 48 frames per second, even though we’re shooting at 24 frames per second and everyone else is moving at normal speed? She did some calculations behind her eyes, then damn. She literally moved to a higher frame rate. I don’t know what category this goes into other than magic.

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