Do your own way

Margot Robbie's Hollywood reign

Interview: Paul Peters, Additional Words: Chris Ujma

From production and stunts to soul-searching role prep and defying typecasting, screen siren and Chanel ambassador Margot Robbie immerses herself in every aspect of the moviemaking experience

“When you are starting out, you are taking any role you can get. You want to be working, you want to be on a film set and get to the next level. Of course when I first started, I did play more stereotypical characters, because those were the ones that were more available to me,” admits Margot Robbie.

Well it’s safe to say that now, as one of Hollywood’s most wanted, she is far beyond such deferrals. “I have reached a point in my career where I can pick and choose the roles that I want to take, I can search for the roles that intrigue me,” she discloses. “The kind of roles that intrigue me are not the stereotypical ones. But I am very lucky not to be in this position where I get to make this decision. And most people don’t get to make that choice."

Granted, she may never play the ‘nice girlfriend’ type, but you can chalk her down as having played every other conceivable role. Having started out in her homeland of Australia on the soap saga Neighbours, Robbie burst onto the silver screen as the overtly glamorous Naomi Lapaglia in The Wolf of Wall Street, popped up in the comic book realm as psychotic criminal Harley Quinn in Suicide Squad, was Oscar nominated for her portrayal of Olympic figure skater Tonya Harding, and next month ascends to the throne as Queen Elizabeth I in Mary Queen of Scots.

What Robbie seeks from a role is a character she “can’t relate to immediately”, she confesses. “I always respond to that kind of character. When I read on the page and I can’t understand why they are doing and saying the things they are doing and saying, they are the characters I am most fascinated by. It’s like a problem I can’t solve. When you do your months of prep, you start solving the problem and learning so much more about it. That to me is interesting. Those are the characters I get excited by.”

It’s a level of anthropology that she can’t switch off. “I watch people in life, I love watching friends, family members, strangers on the street. I am fascinated. I want to know: ‘Why did you do or say that?’ It’s definitely what makes a role interesting to me. The same thing as a producer – when I read a male role, I am thinking: Is this appealing to a male actor as well? They cannot be one-sided. They need to be multi-faceted.”

The above are simply a handful of her noted roles, yet the actor says her methodical approach to each is consistent: “My internal preparation for Harley [Quinn] is no different from preparing Tonya,” Robbie explains.

“I need to do a lot of prep in advance. So in that way the process is no different depending on the scale of the film. The process on set obviously is very different. The bigger the budget, the more time you have. For example, in the case of I, Tonya, if we had an endless budget and all the time in the world, I don’t think we would have made a good film. The spirit of the film, the character, is kind of rough on the edges. It was the scrappy underdog film. And I don’t think we’d have that quality if we had years to prepare and endless budgets to make a nice, neat campaign and perfect sets and costumes. They were quick and handmade.”

Does such commitment make it tough to disconnect from especially tough, abusive roles? “Some characters stick with me, others I can wash off very quickly. Tonya stuck with me for quite a while. I really found it hard to shake her off. Because, to be honest, my character’s emotional state at the time is that she is desensitised to it. She is numb to it because of the routine of it; it was an everyday occurrence to her. I break the fourth wall and speak to the audience, get hit in the face and speak to the audience quite matter-of-factly, because she is completely numb to it,” Robbie recalls of the Academy Award nominated portrayal.

“In other films I have had instances with very emotional moments, like in the upcoming Mary Queen of Scots, where in-between takes, at one moment I couldn’t stop crying. It’s a weird thing when you mess with your emotions. And as an actor you are messing with your emotions a lot of the time. You are replaying horrible moments in your head or you are telling yourself horrible things to get yourself to a certain emotional state.”

Robbie pours such intensity into the method acting process it’s astonishing that she can summon the energy for anything else. She does. The Australian does her own stunts, and acquired “a lot of bumps and bruises,” filming I, Tonya, including “the most horrific blisters you have ever seen. And I did herniate a disc in my neck. It’s all worth it,” she laughs.

For the figure skating scenes, Robbie had face replacement, “but obviously we had a very limited budget and very limited time. If it wasn’t for Craig Gillespie [the director], we couldn’t have afforded any of that. He’s worked a lot in the commercial world and he has a lot of relationships with visual effects houses. So he was confident in what he was doing. We were on the ice – I do the routines and the skate doubles do their bit, the big jumps, and then he would get one plate shot of me standing in front of a blue sheet, holding up on the ice. And he is like, ‘Turn that way, turn that way’, and I was like, ‘Wait, are you sure?’, and he said ‘Trust me, I can work with this.’

So too when she leapt into the DC Universe, playing Quinn in the antihero motley crew containing Jared Leto’s Joker and Will Smith’s Deadshot. “When we did Suicide Squad we used to get full body scans for 40 minutes each. The process was so intensive. On I ,Tonya we were hustling.” One senses a developing pathway for Robbie, that of the all-rounder; in addition to taking on the lead role she also produced I, Tonya. “It was a couple of things (why she produced it). It was wanting to take part in different aspects of filmmaking. I love all filmmaking; I love films. I love pre-production, post-production, the marketing, distribution process. I love all of it.

“I get to work in a more business-oriented side to it, which I enjoy, she reveals, adding, “I get to work with first- and second-time film directors that feel like we are discovering something together, creating roles for females – not just myself.”

She makes a concerted effort to bend the stereotypes of femininity, she says. “I always try to find: How do they feel empowered? How do you empower someone – you can’t judge your character. It would be easy to judge the character of The Duchess of Ray Ridge [Lapaglia in The Wolf of Wall Street]. I definitely judged the Duchess when I first read her, because she was written in a more two-dimensional way, where she was just a gold digger. And I was like: ‘Uh, I don’t like anything about you.’ But once you find a way, you stop judging them, and then you find a way to understand them. And once I figure out, her currency was her sexuality. And this world where the guys got to take what they wanted, her approach was ‘I’m going to get mine, too. I don’t have a lot of money, but I know what I do have and I am going to work with that.’ It became an empowering feeling and in that way I love the character and I understood her, and I didn’t judge her anymore.”