She’s skating on real sin ice
MARGOT Robbie plays the existing stillwith-us Tonya Harding in the new movie “I, Tonya.” They skate alike? Oh, please. In the ’90s, Olympic ice-skating medalist Tonya was the first one ever to perform a triple axel in the short program. They look alike? Margot’s prettier.
Margot: “The story made me think and care. It was people, a world and a sport I knew nothing about. I ended up falling for them, caring for them.”
The actual saga: Tonya had a lousy mother, lousy father, lousy husband, lousy finances and lousy life. From babyhood on, her lone passion was ice skating. She hit the top, fell to the bottom, and for that you have to see the film.
Margot: “I didn’t meet Tonya until a week before shooting. It was surreal. She was incredibly understanding. I told her I had to let the character do good stuff and bad stuff. There was domestic violence. We couldn’t shy away from that. We had to show it.
“Training for me was four to five months. Five days a week, four hours a day, at an ice rink. I actually miss all that skating. Maybe I’ll enter the Winter Olympics next year.”
About Margot skating in the film? “When you see shots of me and can say ‘OK,’ that’s me. But when you say ‘ wow’ — that’s the skate double. No one could stand in for me to do a triple axel. So we had to CGI it in the end.”
Also an executive on this project, she says: “Every time I got on the ice, I put on my producer hat and said, ‘What if I break a leg? I’m out for six weeks!’ ”