Before Barbie, Margot Robbie brought figure skater Tonya Harding’s rise and fall to the big screen. Read THR's cover story from the archives:
set out for Hollywood, an agent in her native Australia advised her to prepare to answer a question she’d inevitably be asked when she arrived.Robbie, then 20 and starring in a local soap opera, took the advice seriously. She began scribbling pages and pages of notes before ultimately whittling her answer down to just three words: “Quality, versatility and longevity.” Nail the first two, she thought, and the third will follow.
She had plenty of friends at school whose families were considerably better off, which, she believes, “was the best scenario to breed ambition.” It gave her a close-up look at the doors financial success can open, just as her own upbringing illustrated how a lack of means can keep them closed. “Breaking a plate or spilling the milk was a big deal at our house. It was like, ‘Well, now we don’t have milk for the week,’ and it put a lot of strain on everyone,” she says.
Robbie was similarly relentless in lining up other roles: that con artist opposite Will Smith in the 2015 thrillerand, soon, a smallpox-addled Queen Elizabeth I, alongside Saoirse Ronan, in the upcoming Focus Features historical drama. Robbie sought out the part of Harding with her producer hat on, reaching out to writer Steven Rogers on behalf of LuckyChap.
Robbie grows more impassioned as she continues. “And it’s like, ‘OK, that’s a different kind of career.’ Because then you need to always do a job that can financially support that lifestyle; you can’t just do indie films for the rest of your life because that film back there changed everything and now you have to be able to afford security.” She pauses to gather her thoughts, and then she adds, “I just wish someone had explained a lot of those things to me early on.
She’s similarly eager to collaborate with other actresses, and openly gushes about a few role models, including Cate Blanchett and Angelina Jolie, with whom she recently bonded backstage at an awards show. “I probably came across as someone who was just sweating and breathing loudly,” says Robbie, who in addition to acting and producing harbors aspirations to write and, like Jolie, direct. It’s worth noting that Robbie’s inner circle doesn’t include a lot of Blanchetts and Jolies.
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