Babylon: Margot Robbie ‘hell bent on making it in Hollywood’

Margot Robbie plays a starlet who muscles her way to the top of Hollywood’s totem pole in Babylon – a role she says she’s ‘never felt closer to’.

Margot Robbie attends the Australian Premiere of Babylon. Picture:Getty

Australian superstar Margot Robbie says you need to “want it to more than everyone else” to conquer Hollywood, and she’s proved again and again she knows how to get what she wants.

Her first major role on Neighbours was only ever meant to be a guest stint, but the show kept her on for three years.

She landed her star-making turn, as “the hottest blonde ever” in Martin Scorsese’s The Wolf of Wall Street, by going rogue during the audition.

“She clinched her part during our first meeting – by hauling off and giving Leonardo DiCaprio a thunderclap of a slap on the face, an improvisation that stunned us all,” Scorsese wrote in TIME.

Now, the 32-year-old actor is at the centre of Damien Chazelle’s three-hour epic, Babylon, which opens in Australian cinemas tomorrow. Robbie plays a firebrand starlet who muscles her way to the top of Hollywood’s totem pole. It’s a role that, Robbie says, she’s “never felt closer to.”

“I definitely relate to (her character) Nellie’s drive,” she tells The Australian. “She kind of just explodes onto screen. She’s hell bent on making it in Hollywood.”

“When you get to Hollywood, there are so many people wanting the same thing. You just need to want it more than everyone else,” says Robbie, who is sitting next to her co-star, Mexican actor Diego Calva at Sydney’s swanky Shell House.

Diego Calva and Margot Robbie attend the Australian premiere of Babylon at State Theatre. Photo: Getty

“I can definitely relate to Nellie’s feeling of, ‘I’ve just got to get there. I’ve just got to get a foot in the door. I’ve just got the get one job. I don’t care what anyone says. I don’t care if I don’t know anyone. I don’t care if I have money. I’m just going to make it happen.”

For Calva, Babylon is a life-changing gig – one he says he owes to Robbie.

Like his character, it’s his first time on an American movie set. It’s no run-of-the-mill set either. Babylon is Oscar-winning La La Land director Damien Chazelle’s most ambitious project to date – shot on 35mm film with limited CGI, at 120 locations with 700 extras, 7000 costumes, and yes, a real life rattlesnake.

Chazelle plucked Calva from relative (landing a lead role next to Brad Pitt is the barometer here) obscurity. Before this, he acted in the third season of Narcos, and the independent feature film I Promise You Anarchy.

The director was struck by Calva’s headshot while hunting for a fresh face to play Manny. Thereafter, the 30-year-old actor submitted several self-taped auditions, and met with Chazelle online during the early months of the Covid pandemic. Though his English was dodgy, and it took a chemistry test with Robbie, who would play his love interest, to cinch the deal.

Margot Robbie and Diego Calva in Babylon. Photo: Paramount Pictures.

“It was my first time in Los Angeles, my first time meeting Damien in person, and my first time meeting Margot,” Calva says. Chazelle filmed the read between the two stars on an iPhone in his backyard. His wife Olivia Hamilton, a producer on the film, had been fighting for Calva from the get go. For the test, she slicked his hair back, and dressed him up in a dapper suit.

“I guess something happened,” says Calva, with genuine humility. “Margot made me feel very secure and when it’s meant to be, it’s meant to be.”

“Landing in acting” was not Calva’s ambition. He had his sights set on directing and screenwriting, enrolling in Centro de Capacitación Cinematográfica, a film school in Mexico City, to study. Like (his character) Manny, he manoeuvred his way through the industry through a series of unglamorous and odd jobs “I was literally on sound department, being the coffee guy, construction – like Manny it was a hustle. I tried so many things.”

“Margot made me feel very secure,” says Diego Calva.

For both Calva and Robbie, their love for cinema stems from childhood. Calva recalls watching a VHS copy of Peter and the Wolf, the 1946 Disney animated short, adapted from Sergei Prokofiev’s masterwork symphony, on repeat. “Every time I heard the music, I got so scared that I had to leave.”

Milla Jovovich in The Fifth Element

Robbie says she had “a pretty eclectic repertoire of films” that she’d re-enact as a child. “There’s a selection of videos that I had at home that I’d watch — all the fight scenes Milla Jovovich did in The Fifth Element, and a lot of old Goldie Hawn and Steve Martin comedies.” Her playfulness is striking in Babylon, a film that asked its actors to improvise — improvisation that saw Robbie plant an off-script kiss on Brad Pitt.

Though she admits she found it “difficult to improvise” in an accent — a Jersey rasp that she landed on after putting forward 31 dialects to Chazelle. “The fact you did it all in a second language is astounding to me,” she says to Calva. “His comedic timing was brilliant. He would be so quick every time.”

Babylon is in cinemas on January 19.