From Gold Coast Girl to Golden Globes and Beyond

Margot Robbie, the girl from the Gold Coast has certainly had a golden rise on the silver screen since landing in Hollywood, attracting every acting accolade from Academy Awards to AACTA Awards and everything in between - but what sets this golden girl with the midas touch apart?

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The world of Hollywood movie making is a far, far cry from the sunny shores of Queensland’s Gold Coast and the stage of your high school musical, but it is a divide Margot Robbie has been able to bridge without breaking her stride or losing touch with the things that are most important to her.

Margot was born in Dalby but moved to the Gold Coast when her parents separated. Margot was raised by her single mother in the beautiful Currumbin Valley along with her three siblings - older sister Anya, older brother Lachlan and younger brother Cameron. They spent much of their time growing up surrounded by family at their grandparents farm.

While she always enjoyed performing and raiding the ‘dress-up’ box as a child, Margot didn’t consider acting as a possible profession until she had worked on her first movie and was leaving school in Year 12.

As part of an interview with Australian Vogue, Margot’s mother, Sarie recounts the day Margot told her she wanted to pursue acting.

“Margot came home and said mum, you’re not going to like this, but I’ve decided I’m going to be an actor and [sic] - my jaw hit the floor because she was really good at school and came from a family with a medical background and a family with a business background, and she told me she was going to be an actor. I was stunned.”

It wasn’t long after completing her school studies Margot decided to head to Melbourne and pursue acting full-time. After cold calling Fremantle Media and accidentally being connected to the casting agent, Margot secured a role on the classic Australian television show Neighbours

Margot was cast as Donna Freedman, a character who initially was planned to only have a small part on the show, but after the positive response to Robbie’s performance, was made more permanent. Margot reprised the role for three years, gaining two Logie nominations over that time for most Popular Female Talent and most Popular Actress.

After Neighbours Margot moved to America where she was quickly cast in short lived television series Pan Am alongside Christina Ricci. It was this role that opened doors to bigger ones - in particular the one that set Margot Robbie’s star ablaze in Hollywood - Martin Scorsese’s The Wolf of Wall Street alongside Leonardo DiCaprio.

The role netted Robbie the Empire Award for Best Newcomer in the same year. Margot’s taste for show business moves beyond just being in front of the camera. The idea of having creative control over projects that mattered appealed greatly to Margot and some of the roommates she was living in London with at the time.

In an interview with Australian Vogue in 2019, Margot recounts how the idea for their production company began to blossom.

“The conversation really started from Josey and I saying that the best roles in a script were always the male characters. From there we said we should make scripts where the female characters are the most awesome – and this was all before it became a popular thing to say about female-focussed projects. The movement hadn’t really started at that point, but after it did it bolstered our confidence in what we were doing and also [changed] people’s appetite for those sorts of projects, so it really timed out perfectly.”

Robbie founded LuckyChap Productions with childhood friend Sophia Kerr, Josey McNamara and her soon to be husband Tom Ackerley in 2014 and the company has gone on to produce some outstanding projects, the first of which was I, Tonya.

Margot played the title character in the film which told the life story of infamous figure skater Tonya Harding and her connection to the attack on rival, Nancy Kerrigan. The film was a huge success grossing $53 million world wide and was made on an $11 million budget.

The film also gained critical success, with the performances of Robbie and Allison Janney (who played LaVona Golden, Tonya’s mother in the film) attracting Academy Award nominations for Best Actress for Robbie and Best Supporting Actress for Janney.

In an interview with The Sydney Morning Herald, Margot recounted the moment when her first Oscar nomination was announced.

“It was wild. It was one of the best moments of my life. [It was during the Australian premiere of I, Tonya] Someone plugged their phone into the DJ booth so it was really loud just when they announced my name. The whole room just went rahhhhhhh and we all started screaming and my mum was crying. It was amazing,” said Robbie.

Despite not winning the Oscar, Robbie was catapulted into a whole new light, now an Academy Award nominated actress. It opened up doors for LuckyChap too, giving the production company immediate chops in the film business and a stronger platform from which they could drive their overarching agenda, which was to tell more female driven stories, told by female writers, actors, directors and crew.

After I, Tonya Margot continued her meteoric rise in Hollywood, undertaking numerous projects, including voicing Flopsy Rabbit in the animated Peter Rabbit films, but it was her role in Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, where she played ill-fated starlet Sharon Tate alongside A-listers Brad Pitt and former castmate Leonardo DiCaprio that once again had her shine.

Also in 2019 Robbie played alongside Hollywood heavy-weights Charlize Theron and countryman Nicole Kidman in Bombshell which tells the story of the numerous female employees of Fox News who were sexually assaulted by the network chairman Roger Ailes. This role bought her second Academy Award nomination, this time as Best Supporting Actress.

Female empowerment and giving women a voice has become a theme synonymous with Margot Robbie, both in the roles she chooses to play and the productions she chooses to be part of, evidenced by her championing of 2020’s Birds of Prey where she reprised the role of serial menace, Harley Quinn alongside an all female action cast.

While obviously gorgeous, it would be easy for Robbie to fall into the ‘pretty girl’ category, but Margot has consistently rejected the stereotypical role, choosing to play the grittier characters with difficult backgrounds, but interesting stories, unafraid to get her hands dirty, which is why it was almost a shock when it was first revealed she would play the title role in 2023’s Barbie. This was no ordinary ‘toy comes to life’ film however.

Robbie purchased the rights for Barbie from Mattel in 2018 and set about collaborating with Greta Gerwig to write and direct the film. What resulted was a film far from what was originally expected. Instead audiences got a lovingly crafted and thoughtfully created film that explored the complexity of the female experience.

The success of Barbie was incredible, becoming the highest grossing film of 2023, bringing in an eye watering $1.4 billion dollars and cementing Margot Robbie as one of the most exciting actresses and filmmakers in the world today - a sentiment echoed by her recently being awarded the Trailblazer Award at the recent Australian Academy of Cinema and Television Arts Awards (AACTA) held back here, in Margot’s hometown of the Gold Coast.

But there is no slowing this powerhouse of the film industry down anytime soon, Robbie is already back on the award season trail and has announced her next project, this time starring alongside Colin Farrel in Kogonada’s film A Big Bold Beautiful Journey which sounds like something Margot Robbie would certainly know a thing or two about.