‘I, Tonya’:
‘I, Tonya’ stars talk about roles in tale of elite skater disgraced after attack on rival
Actress Margot Robbie shares secrets of playing Tonya Harding (above) with Marin film crowd.
the To figure new prepare biopic skater to “I, play Tonya Tonya,” disgraced Harding Margot Olympic in Robbie (“Suicide Squad”) worked with a movement coach who encourages actors to embody animals that fit their characters. “I picked a pit bull,” Robbie told the crowd Saturday night at a screening of “I, Tonya” at the Christopher B. Smith Rafael Film Center in San Rafael. “Because they are so misunderstood, and they are quite often abused, into people they this are have and scary-looking so their the afraid wrong abuse of them. thing, idea turns about But and them really, them.” scenes Robbie off chose the ice. the Harding dog only — for known as the rare woman who could do a triple axel before she became infamous for her link to the why-me whack on rival skater Nancy Kerrigan’s knee in 1994 — was like a mustang when she skated, Robbie decided.
The rink was Harding’s “safe space,” she said. “So I picked a wild horse. They can be graceful and powerful, but also free.”
Robbie looked slightly abashed after revealing this part of her process during a Q&A in which she was joined by co-star Allison Janney, who plays Harding’s mother in “I, Tonya,” opening Dec. 22 in San Francisco.
“I have shared something super intimate with you all, and I feel kind of weird,” Robbie said.
“Don’t worry,” Zoe Elton, her onstage interviewer and the Mill Valley Film Festival head of programming, reassured her. “This is Northern California. Everybody does that here.”
Robbie and Janney are strong contenders for Oscar nominations for “I, Tonya,” a blackly comic take on Harding’s life that never settles for a toe loop when it can attempt a triple axel. The movie rides a line between tragedy and absurdity in depicting Harding’s relationships to her mother and ex-husband, Jeff Gillooly (Sebastian Stan).
Both characters physically abuse Tonya while also being sources of humor, the laughs in Jeff ’s case derived from his bumbling as leader of a conspiracy of dunderheads behind the Kerrigan attack.
The mother swills alcohol during skating practices and orders the young Tonya to “skate wet” after refusing to allow her a bathroom break. As played by the masterful Janney, she’s also a fount of matter-offact one-liners, and ultimately a poignant figure in her inability to connect emotionally with her child.
Janney never met Harding’s real mother, LaVona Golden. Screenwriter Steven Rogers, who interviewed Harding and
“I had to believe she had come from an abusive family and didn’t know how to love.” Allison Janney on Tonya Harding’s mother, whom she plays in “I, Tonya”
Gillooly for the film, could not locate her. But Janney studied archival footage of Golden to find her “humanity,” she said in an interview with The Chronicle on Saturday, Dec. 2.
“I had to believe she had come from an abusive family and didn’t know how to love,” she said.
Janney and Robbie picked up statuettes for their work in “I, Tonya” from the Mill Valley Film Festival on Saturday. The pair could not make it to San Rafael when “Tonya” screened at the October festival, Robbie said. Saturday’s screening was to make up for that.
It was more hardware than Harding won at the Olympics. She placed fourth in Albertville, France, in 1992 and eighth in 1994 in Lillehammer, Norway, where Kerrigan, recovered from the attack on her knee earlier that year, nabbed silver. Harding, convicted of conspiring to hinder the prosecution of the criminal case tied to the attack, was banned from skating for life.
Robbie and Janney arrived at the Rafael an hour into the screening, making for a low-key red carpet, since most fans were in the theater. Robbie wore a flowing jumpsuit and Janney a satin dress.
Their ensembles, though elegant, lacked the visual punch of Tonya’s fur coat in the film. But that garment — fashioned from rabbits shot by Harding’s hunter dad — was a one-of-akind item.