From Babylon to Barbie: How Margot Robbie became the ultimate 21st century movie star

Hard-working and hands-on, Robbie has her own production company, is in full control of her image and remains un-blinkered by fame or ego. Photo / Getty Images

The key to understanding Margot Robbie isn’t any of the roles she’s played or professional moves she’s made. It’s a WhatsApp message she sent in October 2017.

A few months before receiving her first Oscar nomination for her work in the ice-skating drama I, Tonya, the then-27-year-old actress was due to give a speech at a glossy soirée paying tribute to women in Hollywood.

She could hardly avoid addressing the #MeToo scandals unfolding at the time: the New York Times had run its expose on Harvey Weinstein just two days earlier. But what extra light could she personally shed? To work it out, she sent out an appeal to her London group chat of young women working in the industry, largely behind the scenes. What should she raise there? Which important stories remained untold? The ensuing flood of replies were compiled by her into an open letter, which she later read out at the event. It was signed not by Robbie herself, but simply “The Girls Club”.

What do we learn from this? First, that she is not averse to doing her homework. But second, and more importantly, that even four years after has career-making turn in The Wolf of Wall Street – by which point she was a comic-book heroine, had starred in a glossy con-artist caper opposite Will Smith, and had become famous enough to cameo in The Big Short as herself – the vanity that so often goes hand-in-hand with early-stage movie stardom (equal parts ego trip and survival strategy) had simply never kicked in.

Six years on from then, she’s now literally Barbie incarnate; the star of a plastic doll-themed summer comedy which, despite its almost invisibly subtle marketing campaign, you may have heard is in cinemas. But in toy terms, she still prefers to be off the shelf and down in the box.

That attitude was hardwired during her soap opera days, where rattling out episodes at speed was a group effort, and the usual Hollywood hierarchies (stars and mortals, cast and crew) simply didn’t exist. Like other Australian stars before her – Guy Pearce, Kylie Minogue – she honed her craft on Neighbours, moving to Melbourne from her family’s farm in rural Queensland and pestering her way into a role at 17 years old.

America Ferrera, Margot Robbie, Alexandra Shipp, and Ariana Greenblatt in Barbie. Photo / Warner Bros.

She was cast as Donna Freedman, a quirky free spirit who was initially only meant to appear for a short run of episodes. In the end she stayed for 327 – and they would have gladly had her for longer, if other doors hadn’t begun to swing temptingly open on the other side of the planet.

She moved to Hollywood at 21, during the annual audition binge of pilot season, and within weeks had been cast opposite Christina Ricci in the period drama series Pan Am. The show tried to do for air hostessing what Mad Men did for the ad business, but it was cancelled after one season, and from the solitude of her private trailer, Robbie missed the canteen camaraderie of the Neighbours days.

Now with a freer schedule, she was auditioning again – and was cast by Martin Scorsese in The Wolf of Wall Street over more established talents like Blake Lively and Amber Heard when, improvising during a reading with Leonardo DiCaprio, she slapped her A-list scene partner across the face. No vanity, no hierarchy: that goes for co-stars too.

Scorsese would later rave to Time magazine about the classic Hollywood actresses whose trademarks she’d brought to the present: “Carole Lombard, for her all-bets-off feistiness; Joan Crawford, for her grounded, hardscrabble toughness; Ida Lupino, for her emotional daring. Margot has all this in addition to a unique audacity that surprises and challenges and just burns like a brand into every character she plays.”

Margot Robbie and Leonardo DiCaprio in The Wolf of Wall Street. Photo / Supplied

But for Josie Rourke, who directed Robbie’s Bafta-nominated performance as Elizabeth I in 2018′s Mary Queen of Scots, the historical direction of travel is reversed. “Many of her most famous roles, from The Wolf of Wall Street to Suicide Squad to Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, have been described as bombshells, and I think by that people mean they line up with a very 20th century idea of female sexuality on film,” she says.

“But Margot is an inherently 21st century performer – she understands what that image is and how to access it, but she’s also in conversation with it, and able to reflect on her role in its authorship.” In Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, that process became the film’s greatest scene: Robbie as Sharon Tate sitting in the cinema and watching the real Sharon Tate play Freya Carlson, the sexy klutz, in The Wrecking Crew, losing herself in the hall-of-mirrors artifice of it, while delighting in the reactions it elicits from others.

Margot Robbie as Sharon Tate in Once Upon A Time In Hollywood. Photo / supplied

Perhaps that explains why Barbie was all Robbie’s idea. After a previous iteration of the film fell through, she went to meet with Mattel in 2018, fathomed her own take on this Stepfordian icon of midcentury femininity (yes yes, Barbie was a politician and an astronaut too), and then spent a year persuading Greta Gerwig to direct and co-write it.

“There are people who adore Barbie, people who hate Barbie – but the bottom line is everyone knows Barbie,” Robbie later told the New Yorker, before conceding that her deconstructionist approach was a “tall order” for a summer film based on a popular toy brand. “The dangerous thing about making something for everyone is that you ultimately make it for no one.” At one point, she debated at length with the Barbie brand guardians over a proposed scene in which her character (known as ‘Stereotypical Barbie’) is accused of being damaging to girls’ self-esteem. After six hours of discussion, it was decided it should stay in.

Margot Robbie as Tonya Harding in I, Tonya.

To Robbie, that sort of control matters. One of the first things she did after The Wolf of Wall Street was set up her own production company, LuckyChap Entertainment, with some close friends and her then-partner (and now husband) Tom Ackerley. (She’d met Ackerley when he was working as an assistant director on her 2014 film Suite Française: once again, hanging out with the crew paid off.)

Their first film, I, Tonya, retold the Tonya Harding scandal from the ice-skating world: like Robbie’s Barbie, the actress embraced her as a love-or-hate figure, and the role yielded her first Oscar nomination. A few years later, LuckyChap co-produced Birds of Prey, a comic-book spin-off in which Robbie’s Harley Quinn, from Suicide Squad, took centre stage, and wrestled back control of her fate and image.

Margot Robbie as Harley Quinn in Suicide Squad.

Rourke remembers watching Robbie in the original Suicide Squad, before the filming of Mary Queen of Scots, “and realising that such a big part of star power is dignity. I mean, the film was completely insane role, but she gave an incredibly dignified performance in the middle of a lot of other stuff that was swirling.” For Rourke, that’s what makes her a screen actress for the ages: “that dignified, earthed presence, where she can just hold a moment on screen for herself, makes an instant compact between her and the audience: ‘don’t worry, wherever this goes, you’re safe with me.’”

Over the years, other unmade versions of the Barbie film have come and gone: Anne Hathaway and Amy Schumer were both at one stage attached to earlier iterations of the project. Perhaps Robbie feels like such a good fit because of that reassurance – and perhaps because, like Sharon Tate watching herself on screen, there’s that sliver of distance from, and playful curiosity about, the mechanisms by which this fantasy is made.

In short, she’s in on the joke – and she wants you to be in there with her too.