Margot Robbie would not have made Barbie movie if not for diverse dolls
The actor and producer is currently in Australia on the first stop of the blockbuster’s press tour and says she might not have made the movie if not for a big change at toymaker Mattel.
Barbie star and producer Margot Robbie says she only agreed to take part in the upcoming film based on the iconic Mattel doll because manufacturers made more diverse models.
“If [Mattel] hadn‘t made that change to have a multiplicity of Barbies, I don’t think I would have wanted to be part of the Barbie film,” the actor told Time Magazine.
Once one of the world‘s top-selling dolls, Barbie sales plummeted in the early 2000s as other toy companies began manufacturing dolls that showed more diversity. In 2016, Mattel unveiled the Fashionistas line, introducing “body diversity” to its Barbie dolls, whose unrealistically thin frame has attracted criticism for decades.
Mattel has since increased the diversity of its line by introducing a number of Barbies that differ from the “Teen-aged Fashion Model” that first debuted in 1959. The new dolls include Barbies in wheelchairs, Barbies with the auto-immune condition vitiligo, and, most recently, a doll depicted as having Down’s syndrome. ”I don’t think you should say, ’This is the one version of what Barbie is, and that’s what women should aspire to be and look like and act like,’” Robbie said.
In the upcoming Greta Gerwig film, Robbie will play a Barbie who begins to question her mortality and life outside her dreamhouse world. When Robbie first met Mattel CEO Ynon Kreiz in an attempt for her production company, LuckyChap, to secure the rights to the doll, she told the executive that she was insistent that the film confront the stickier aspects of the doll‘s history.
“We impressed upon Ynon that we are going to honour the legacy of your brand, but if we don’t acknowledge certain things – if we don’t say it, someone else is going to say it,” Robbie said. ”So you might as well be a part of that conversation.”
The actor revealed that at one point during production, Mattel president and COO Richard Dickson flew to the movie‘s London set to argue with Gerwig and Robbie about a scene he believed was “off-brand” for the company. The director and her star convinced Dickson to keep the scene in the film by performing it for him live on set. ”When you look on the page, the nuance isn’t there, the delivery isn’t there,” Robbie said.
Robbie, Gerwig, and Barbie movie co-stars Issa Rae and America Ferrera touched down in Sydney on Wednesday to kick off the first stop on a global publicity tour for the film. Barbie opens in theatres worldwide on July 20.
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