MARGOT ROBBIE
On why life’s like a movie
In a casual baby doll dress and fuzzy slip-on shoes, two-time Oscar nominee Margot Robbie spent a sunny Sunday in Los Angeles at a friend’s house on July 5. The outing came three days after celebrating her 30th birthday while holed up at home with her husband Tom Ackerley, 30. “It’s such a weird, weird time. It’s like living in a movie,” she shared with actress Carey Mulligan during an interview with her for Vogue Australia’s May issue. She also revealed she’s bought a banjo while in lockdown and is learning French. “I think everyone is going to come out of this with a whole new perspective of life and a whole array of very bizarre hobbies.”
The chance to slow down may come as a relief to Robbie, who has been living in the fast lane since age 17 when she moved from the Gold Coast – where she’d grown up as the third of four children raised by their mother – to pursue acting in Melbourne. She was quickly cast in Neighbours (“I didn’t think there was higher than that for me,” she has said) and after heading to Hollywood in 2011, she worked steadily before her breakout role opposite Leonardo DiCaprio in 2013’s The Wolf of Wall Street. A year later, she founded production company LuckyChap Entertainment with Ackerley and their friends Josey McNamara and Sophia Kerr. Ackerley and Robbie married in Byron Bay in 2016, three years after meeting on the set of the World War II drama Suite Française. “I’m a great advocate of doing business with your partner,” she told Porter magazine in 2018. “Being married is actually the most fun ever, life got way more fun somehow.”
And definitely busier. “We don’t get as
much downtime as we probably like, but we both really like what we do,” Robbie said in a February interview with The Project. “We also have a lot of time to chill – actually that’s a lie we don’t have time to chill – but we have a lot of fun and we love what we do.”
In addition to Robbie’s acting roles in Bombshell and Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood, LuckyChap has already churned out buzzworthy offerings including I, Tonya, Birds of Prey and Promising Young Woman, which stars Carey Mulligan and was pushed back due to the pandemic. She’s also set to produce and star in a film about Barbie from director Greta Gerwig. “Margot just impresses the bloody weasels out of me,” her Bombshell co-star Charlize Theron has told Variety. “At this age taking control of her career, and just being so proactive in what she wants to make, what she wants to put out there — I’m a little intimidated by her.”
When lockdown hit, Robbie, who remains close to a group of girlfriends in Australia, had just wrapped The Suicide Squad, which is slated for release in late 2021. With four other projects in the works, it was announced on June 26 that she’ll star in a female-fronted Pirates of the Caribbean movie.
In the meantime, to cope with living at a slower pace, she says, “I have lists of things I need to do that day, long term, short term, fun stuff, not fun stuff,” she said in a video about mental health for Child Mind Institute. “It gets it out of my mind and on paper. If I don’t get through my list that day, I don’t stress about it, I just pick up where I left off the next day.”