‘I, TONYA’
DEC. 8
Stars: Margot Robbie, Allison Janney and Sebastian Stan Director: Craig Gillespie
The skinny: In the darkly comic biopic, Robbie plays Tonya Harding from awkward 15-year-old to disgraced figure-skating champion following the 1994 attack on rival Nancy Kerrigan; Janney co-stars as her abusive mom and Stan is infamous ex-husband Jeff Gillooly. One of the keys to playing the polarizing Olympic hopeful was “embracing the spirit of real-life Tonya (as well as) the spirit of the person audiences had seen over the years,” Robbie says. The movie also maps Harding ’s longtime struggle to belong in the skating world as a blue-collar athlete while also refusing to conform to the dainty, unaggressive ideology judges preferred. “It is a wonderful character conflict to map throughout the story and it’s always evidently there,” Robbie says. “I definitely feel moments of that when I watch real-life interviews with Tonya.”