UNDER HER SPELL
“I’m not thinking about who is going to play Sharon at all because for me it was you. You suggested her in so many different ways”
No-one is immune from the power of Margot Robbie. In a global exclusive, Quentin Tarantino sits down with his leading lady and reveals that she was first– and only – choice for the biggest film of the year.
No-one is immune from the power of Margot Robbie. In a global exclusive, Quentin Tarantino sits down with his leading lady and reveals that she was first– and only – choice for the biggest film of the year. Styled by Christine Centenera. Photographed by Mario Sorrenti.
At 29, Margot Robbie has built one of the most impressive nascent careers on screen, thanks to star turns in The Wolf of Wall Street, Suicide Squad and, more recently, I, Tonya, which she also produced. But her new role as actress Sharon Tate, who was killed in the Charles Manson murders in 1969, is set to propel her to even greater heights. In Quentin Tarantino’s ninth and penultimate film, Once Upon A Time in … Hollywood, Robbie is both mesmerising and energetic opposite her one-time film star neighbour Rick Dalton (played by Leonardo DiCaprio) and his stunt double Cliff Booth (Brad Pitt), who are clinging to the final days of cinema’s golden age.
On a recent Friday in Los Angeles, Tarantino, the Academy Award-, Golden Globe- and BAFTA-winning director, sat down with Robbie to discuss her own Hollywood fairytale and how fate played a part in bringing the two together.
QUENTIN TARANTINO: “So Margot, I’m asking this out of my edification; I’m very curious. How does someone who has established a career as an actor in another country, in this case Australia, decide to move to America and try to conceivably work in Hollywood? Because it’s really hard to do. Are you even an American citizen?” MARGOT ROBBIE: “I have a working visa and I’m an American resident. But it does boggle my mind. It’s not something I ever dreamed of doing, because it was so unrealistic.”
QT: “I don’t know about you, but for me, the minute I could even remotely make a living as a writer [in Hollywood] it was like: ‘Oh my god, this is a dream come true!’” (Laughs)
MR: “I definitely had that moment. I got on Neighbours and I thought that in itself was the biggest thing that was ever going to happen to me. I remember looking around the green room of 30 cast members and asking everyone over the first few weeks whether they had other jobs, and they were like: ‘This is the only job I have.’ And I was like: ‘But you’ve got kids, right? You can put them through school and you can buy a house just from acting?’ That was a crucial moment where it was: ‘Right, I can make a living out of this.’ Then a few months after being on Neighbours, I witnessed a couple of cast members my age making that transition to LA after finishing up their contracts. I remember thinking: ‘Okay, now I have the lay of the land I have three options. One, I get fired because I’m not good enough. Two, I am good enough and I get to stay on Neighbours for 20 years and what an amazing life that would be. Or three, I take the gamble and make the jump over to America and try my luck in Hollywood. So about six months in I made the decision and started saving money and learning the American dialect. You’ve met me with my Australian accent now, but my Australian accent as it was then was very, very Australian.”
QT: “A XXXX Aussie accent!” (Laughs)
MR: “I am a Queenslander, and my accent was so Australian that Neighbours hired a dialect coach to make me sound less Australian. So that was all part of the process of moving to America. Before that the idea of being in Hollywood, I did think you had to be born into it or had to know someone in the industry.”
QT: “Was the TV show Pan Am the first big: ‘Oh wow, I’ve landed something?’”
MR: “Yeah. During my three years on Neighbours I’d gotten a proper agent, Aran Michael, and he started helping me when I said I wanted to make the move. Every year I’d say: ‘Aran, I need to get to America, I’m getting too old. I’m going to miss my opportunity.’ I was 18. For some reason Dakota Fanning was the standard in my head. I’d say: ‘Do you know how many films Dakota Fanning has done by now? And she’s younger than me!’ But he was like: ‘No, we’ve got to time this so you get over there in advance of pilot season, meet with American managers, then come back in January to hit the ground running.’ You only get the chance to be brand-new once, so five days after October 22, which was when my Neighbours contract ended, I came over.”
QT: “So you landed a pilot on your first go around?”
MR: “Well, while I was over here meeting with managers I was asked to do a quick audition, because someone was redoing Charlie’s Angels for TV. I wasn’t ready to audition until January so I was a bit thrown, but I did it then went back to Australia. They flew me over to do a tester in January and I didn’t get it, but they said they had another TV show called Pan Am they thought I’d be better for.”
QT: “So literally on that first pilot go, even before the first pilot go – from that one little piddly audition you got your first TV show?”
MR: “Yeah. Then all of a sudden I was shooting a pilot in New York City. You have to remember I was living on the Gold Coast, so I thought I was living in a city. When I’d see my family who live in Dalby [in rural Queensland] they’d call me a city kid. When I moved to Melbourne to do Neighbours, I was like: ‘Whoa, this is a city.’ Then when I got to New York, I’m like: ‘I was totally wrong, this is what a city looks like.’”
QT: “You were a little Crocodile Dundee walking around New York.”
MR: “Yeah. ‘That’s not a knife …’ Everything was so crazy. Before I knew it we’d done the pilot for Pan Am and there was a poster up in Times Square. I’d barely been there six months.”
QT: “But that’s how this town is. With some people it can take 12 years to have any sort of movement; other people it takes six months. Or sometimes people have six months then it takes them 12 years to get to the next place.”
MR: “There’s no specific timeline, I guess, and you’re right, that’s the magic of Hollywood. Everything can change so quickly. People often ask me what’s been the best part. I couldn’t say Wolf of Wall Street was better than my time on Neighbours and I couldn’t say that
Z for Zachariah wasn’t as important to me as Tarzan. It’s all been so exciting.” QT: “I have to figure the right way to ask this so it doesn’t sound like I’m fishing for a compliment, but here’s the situation – I’d been running this script [for Once Upon a Time in … Hollywood] for a long time. I was getting down to finishing it and speculating like crazy who can be Cliff and who can be Rick [roles that went to Pitt and DiCaprio] but I’m not thinking about who is going to play Sharon at all, because for me there was no number two – it was you. You suggested her in so many different ways and you can more than hold your weight in this gigantic triangle that I’m trying to carry with three leads to tell the story. But this was the year you exploded and were now the most popular actress in town. It was something like within two weeks of me finishing the script, having it typed up, and out of the blue I get a letter sent to my house and it’s from you. I’m like: ‘What?!’ One minute I’m thinking about you and then I get this letter. In it you expressed that you’ve been a fan of my work for a long time – you and your whole family – and you say: ‘I just want you to know if there’s something you’d like me for, just let me know.’ It was damn near romantic the way the letter was written because it was so great. It was exactly what I wanted to hear. I couldn’t believe the happenstance of it all. Within a week we got together and were talking. So what prompted you to write that letter?” MR: “I had wanted to write the letter for years and years and years. Because I’d heard you were going to do 10 movies and I couldn’t bear the thought I would miss the boat and never see what one of your film sets was like: I needed to figure out a way to get on to set. Maybe I could even hold a door in the back of a scene. [Laughs.] But at the same time I wasn’t really in the right position to reach out to Quentin Tarantino and say: ‘Hello, my name is Margot and can I come visit your sets?’”
QT: Laughs.
MR: “So I knew I wasn’t in that position yet and each time something exciting in my career would happen to put me on the map a little more, I thought: ‘Okay, I feel like I’m getting more established and maybe now’s the time.’ It wasn’t until we did I, Tonya that I thought: ‘Now I’m happy with my acting. I feel like I’ve reached the stage where this body of work will show people what I can do as an actor. Now I’m ready to chat with Quentin Tarantino and write that letter.’ I remember agonising over everything – the paper, the pen, how I was going to write it – big, small, spaced out. Then, of course, I thought you might not be able to get the letter anyway, so I should stop freaking out so much, and then I just wrote the goddamn thing and prayed that somehow it would get to you, and it did. A couple of weeks later I remember getting the phone call saying: ‘Quentin got your letter and he’d really like to meet up.’ I didn’t want to get ahead of myself, but then when we sat down – I remember you ordered an iced tea with a sweetener – I felt like it was the most exciting meeting I’ll ever take in my life. I remember you said: ‘Do you know who Sharon Tate is?’ and I said: ‘Yes, I do’, because, funnily enough, after I first moved to LA, another Aussie actor Rhys Wakefield and I used to drive up to Cielo Drive [where the Manson Tate murders took place] and read Helter Skelter [a book written about the murders] out loud.”
QT: “No kidding, really?”
MR: “Yeah, seriously, that was our thing. We’d go in the middle of the night and read Helter Skelter out loud to freak ourselves out.”
QT: “You never told me this!”
MR: “I know. There are so many Hollywood stories and so many stories ingrained in Hollywood history and that’s one of the standouts. So did I know Sharon Tate? Well, I knew all about her death. But I’d never ever looked into anything about her life and it wasn’t until reading your script that I suddenly went: ‘Oh my god, I’ve only ever thought about this woman dead.’ I had never taken a second to appreciate her life, and that’s what was so amazing and touching about your script. She became so alive on the page and alive in my imagination. I can see her doing all the things you had her doing, walking around or dancing in a bedroom or whatever it is. And then to go back and do all that research and watch all her movies and see her interviews – it was truly a great gift to focus on her life.” QT: “There was something very charming in making this movie with you. Brad and Leo have been at it [working] for almost as long as I have – I’m almost at 30 years. I’m still very excited to be doing this movie but I’m now getting to the age where you know, it is what it is, and it was so charming to be working with you: someone who wasn’t blasé about it at all. You’re like the opposite of jaded. You were my wall socket from time to time that I’d plug into. I was like: ‘I’m enjoying this, but I don’t think I’m enjoying it quite as much as Margot, and I need to.’” MR: “You are happiest director I’ve ever seen on set, you’re so excited, and that’s how I felt.”
QT: “Well, I am that way. But nevertheless you were my power pack of enthusiasm.”
MR: “But no matter how many sets I’ve been on, it’s not the same as this one. There was little imagination needed, because it was all there [like it was in 1969], right down to the music playing – the cars, the furniture, everything was there in front of us and it was tactile and it was real. No cell phones meant that I would never be reminded throughout the day we’re in 2019 – we could exist in that other era. I can’t think of ever being on a set where I’ve not had to really use my imagination to transport myself. It’s like you took that work out of our hands completely. It all came from such a personal place and it was like tapping into your own memories. It was unlike any other set I’d ever seen before and the whole experience was amazing.”
Once Upon a Time in … Hollywood is in cinemas now.