Margot Robbie's incredible road to the Academy Awards
SHE was the teenager who brazenly cold-called the casting agent for Neighbours. Now Margot Robbie reveals how she rose to the top in Hollywood.
Stellar
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THERE isn’t much that scares Margot Robbie. The Queensland-born actor cold-called her way into a role on Neighbours at the tender age of 17, and in the decade since she has made it abundantly clear that she does not let fear hold her back.
She famously slapped Leonardo DiCaprio in the face — a wallop that was not in the script — during her audition for 2013’s The Wolf Of Wall Street; her nerve helped land Robbie the role, her breakthrough in Hollywood. A year later, against the advice of “pretty much everyone”, she was launching her own production company alongside two best friends and the man who she would ultimately marry. Robbie simply seems to have mounted her career in the same way that she has moved through life: with daring certainty.
But concerns for her new project I, Tonya, which documents the infamous 1994 kneecapping of Olympic figure skater Nancy Kerrigan and the involvement of rival Tonya Harding’s ex-husband, are keeping her awake at night. “I have never been so nervous for people to see a movie in my entire life,” Robbie tells Stellar. “We go all out in this movie. So, are people going to get it? Are they going to respond to it? I mean, is the public going to hate it and the critics love it, or the other way around? Or are they all going to hate it and no-one loves it?”
I, Tonya represents a series of film firsts for Robbie: her first headlining role, her first producer credit and the first movie to be released by her production company LuckyChap. And owing to the fact she spends a lot of the film spinning around an ice rink as a world-renowned figure skater, it was also her first time on skates. She was, after all, born in rural Queensland and raised on the Gold Coast.
“The weight has never been on my shoulders in this way,” Robbie says. “It’s always been shared around. And to be a producer on this [means] I can’t blame anyone else if people don’t like it. I can’t say, ‘The filmmakers made some bad choices!’ Because, well, I was a part of all those choices. If this sucks, it’s my fault in large part.”
When Robbie greets Stellar with a hug at a hip West Hollywood hotel, she looks even younger than her 27 years. She has a beach-wave bob and is dressed simply: white off-the-shoulder peasant top, ripped and faded boyfriend jeans and flats. She is petite, fresh-faced, and seemingly oblivious to a gawping trio of nearby male staff who watch from behind the front desk. Their jaws drop as she approaches them and asks for directions to a nearby couch. And as she leads Stellar away for a chat, Robbie apologises profusely for scheduling the interview on a Sunday night. “I just don’t have a minute free in my schedule at the moment,” she explains, before apologising again — she worries how that sounds — and ordering a Diet Coke.
It has indeed been a hectic year for Robbie, who will celebrate her first anniversary with British film-producer husband Tom Ackerley tomorrow. She made back-to-back films and moved from London to Los Angeles where she has bought her first home, which she shares with Ackerley and their rescue dog, “a little mutt” named Boo Radley. “I still feel reluctant to call this home,” she admits. “It’s where I am currently residing; it’s difficult to grow roots here. I guess being married changed things. But about two years ago, I got really sick of not having a bedroom, or staying in hotels or Airbnbs for months on end — and when everyone talked about going home, I didn’t have a place to picture. It freaks me out, it feels like too much commitment — I am used to living like a gypsy.”
For Robbie, it seems that “home” is still very much Australia. She tells Stellar that if one regret stands out from the past 12 months, it is that she was not able to return for a visit. “It’s the longest I have ever gone being away from home and it’s killing me,” she says, adding that she would ideally be back “every couple of months”. Asked what she misses most, her response spills out: “Everything, my God. Everything, from something as trivial as good coffee or hearing a certain bird — something random that you don’t realise you are going to miss when you go. I miss the thunderstorms more than anything; nowhere else has good thunderstorms like you do on the Gold Coast. Obviously big things like my family and my friends, being there to see my nephew grow up, weddings, funerals, all those big important moments where everyone comes together. To be away during those things sucks. But even the small things suck. Like, I miss Burger Rings, I miss Nutri-Grain! I can’t wait to go back.”
But not long ago it seemed like she couldn’t wait to get out, and approached her move to LA in 2011 with a blend of “blind optimism” and the near-obsessive planning and plotting that has been a key personality trait ever since she can remember. “I didn’t think I was going to end up in Hollywood, but even at nine years old I would think, ‘OK, if Mum’s at work I am not going to stay home. If I want to get my ears pierced and she said no, well... that’s too bad. I need to get them pierced. So I am going to find out how I go to the shopping mall, look up all the bus timetables, take five buses to get there and get this done.’ When I wanted to do something, I would just figure it out.”
And she had an early passion for the business of show business before she even knew what it was. “When I was young, I was trying to sell things on the side of the road or I would invent magic tricks and lure my family — well, force them, really — to come see the magic tricks and make them pay to know how I did the trick. I was always running little businesses when I was a kid. Now that I am saying this out loud, I must have been such an annoying kid.”
She acted in every high school production she could before moving to Melbourne, where she crashed on a friend’s couch until she landed a role on Neighbours, which only happened after she repeatedly phoned the production company until they agreed to let her audition. On reflection, she says, “It just seemed like the only way to get it done.”
Still today, she adds, “I plan everything like crazy.” When it came time to pursue her career overseas, she mapped it out with equal precision: “Like, ‘When do I move? What steps do I need to have taken before making the move to America? What steps do I need to have taken before signing up with an agency? What steps do I need to have taken before doing this?’
“Same with my characters. I cannot show up to set and just wing it. I need months of preparation. I need to have made every decision. I need to have studied the dialect. I need to have every single intention, plus three back-up options of a way to play the scene before I even get to set. So in some ways I don’t plan at all, and in others I plan like a crazy person.”
Her first role in the US was as an air hostess on short-lived ’60s-set TV drama Pan Am; she then landed The Wolf Of Wall Street, which propelled her to the top of casting directors’ lists. Since then, Robbie has been in blockbusters such as 2016’s Suicide Squad (her Harley Quinn character became an instant dress-up party favourite) and The Legend Of Tarzan to smaller, more intimate films like the recent period piece Goodbye Christopher Robin and Suite Française (on which she met Ackerley).
She has acted alongside some of Hollywood’s biggest names, including Will Smith, Samuel L Jackson, Tina Fey and Jared Leto. More recently, “I’ve spent more time with Nicole [Kidman]. We just did a photo shoot together and we run into each other at events quite often; there’s such a kinship with other Aussies, especially when you’re living outside Australia. You kind of flock together. I also obviously grew up a massive fan of hers, so being able to say ‘Hi Nicole’ is kind of crazy to me.”
The attack on Nancy Kerrigan was briefly the biggest news in the world in 1994, but when the script for I, Tonya came to Robbie, she didn’t quite believe it — literally; after all, she was just four when the scandal broke. Once she decided it was a role worth tackling, Robbie went about it in her typically methodical way, spending months of preparation to play Harding, who cooperated with the film’s writer. But she avoided coming face-to-face with Harding until after the six months spent in what she calls “Tonyaland” had come to an end. “All I did was watch videos of Tonya, documentaries of Tonya, skating segments on Tonya, listening to her voice on my iPod all day long and when I would go to sleep at night. I was surrounded by her always, constantly — for months. And then to be sitting across from her was so bizarre.”
Robbie depicts Harding from the age of 15 to her mid-40s, in the now mostly unflattering fashions of the time, with a bad perm and stark make-up. When you consider she also played the Joker-like Harley Quinn and will be seen as the balding, pockmarked Queen Elizabeth I in next year’s Mary Queen Of Scots, there does seem to be a bit of a theme emerging for Robbie, who is so widely renowned for her beauty. “Versatility like that is all I could ever dream of as an actor,” she says. “I am really happy that I am in a place right now where I get to do such roles.”
She acknowledges that it can be easy to be typecast as an ingénue and not be considered for more complex roles. “People are always hesitant,” she says. “And I get it, because on the producing side I see it too when you are going through a casting list. To cast someone as something you have never seen them do anything like it before — you are taking a huge gamble.
“You are already taking enough gambles making a film. You’ve got a lot of money that’s not yours on the line; you want to make smart decisions. So to throw caution to the wind like that is a difficult thing to do. It’s something I am always fighting for, yet I understand it’s a difficult thing to achieve.”
Robbie learnt (or at least relearnt) all of the above with I, Tonya, and says she remains “extremely hopeful” she will make it back in the new year for the local premiere. And maybe again soon after, for a far longer stretch of time.
“Next year’s goal is to be filming something back home in Australia. That’s our goal. We have got a lot of good things in development, amazing Aussie writers and Aussie directors, and that’s what I am most excited about for 2018: coming home.”
I, Tonya is in cinemas on January 25. Previews from January 19 to 21.
Stellar magazine returns for the year this coming Sunday January 28, inside The Sunday Telegraph and Sunday Herald Sun