ICE QUEEN The biggest scandal in figure-skating history is brought to life on the big screen in I, Tonya.
The film ‘I, Tonya,’ tells figure skater Tonya Harding’s side of the tabloid scandal that rocked the 1994 Olympics. But is it true?
We’re sitting on the eighth floor of a Manhattan office building, and Allison Janney is about to say what she really thinks of Olympic figure skater Tonya Harding. More than 20 years ago, an attack on Harding’s competitor Nancy Kerrigan implicated Harding and ignited a media frenzy that shook up the 1994 Winter Olympics and rattled the refined ethos of the sport. Does the actress, who plays Harding’s acid-tongued mother in I, Tonya, think Harding had anything to do with the incident? But just as Janney opens her mouth, the building’s fire alarm starts blaring. “Well!” Janney says, grinning. “Maybe we should go.”
We might as well. Because whatever Janney’s—or anyone’s—feelings about Harding may be, this movie is likely to challenge them. The darkly comedic drama from director Craig Gillespie
( Lars and the Real Girl) and writer Steven Rogers ( Love the Coopers) chronicles the journey of Harding ( Suicide Squad’s Margot Robbie) from figure-skating prodigy to disgraced Olympian from multiple perspectives—because, as Robbie’s Harding bitterly declares in the film, “there’s no such thing as truth.”
But there is such a thing as reality. And in reality, a man hired by Harding’s ex-husband, Jeff Gillooly, and her bodyguard Shawn Eckardt kneecapped rival Nancy Kerrigan on Jan. 6, 1994, weeks before the Olympics in Lillehammer, Norway. The men served time in prison. Harding, after pleading guilty to obstructing the investigation, received a lifetime ban from competitive skating.
I, Tonya (out on Jan. 25) details all of this. Actors meticulously re-enact the incident as well as prime-time interviews given in the aftermath. Robbie wears exact replicas of the costumes Harding wore on the ice. Janney performs with a pet bird perched on her shoulder, just like Harding’s mum, Lavona Golden, did for a TV appearance. It hits every major, absurd beat, including Harding’s broken skate lace at the Olympics, her press conference
expressing sympathy for Kerrigan, and the crumpled note the FBI found with Harding’s handwriting on it, spelling out where and when Kerrigan trained.
The one thing it avoids, notably, is Kerrigan’s side of the story. Played by Caitlin Carver, Kerrigan appears in just two scenes and utters a single line: “Whyyyyy?” Rogers says he chose early on to minimise Kerrigan’s perspective. “It’s not I, Nancy. It’s I, Tonya,” he says. “Nothing against Nancy Kerrigan, but I wanted to tell the story of the people who potentially thought [the attack] was a good idea.”
That story centres on Harding, obviously, and Gillooly. (Eckardt died in 2007; see box.) Rogers tracked both of them down in Oregon, where he conducted hours of separate interviews. After noticing how contradictory their accounts were, he shaped his screenplay around their conflicting testimonies, toggling scenes between Harding’s and Gillooly’s points of view and sprinkling in re-created present-day interviews to add context. At times, characters even break the fourth wall midscene to inform the audience whether something—to their recollection— happened. “We’re seeing stories that are actually being contradicted in the middle of scenes,” Gillespie says. “It gets so complicated.” His stars certainly thought so. “It was so difficult to play a scene that was Jeff’s perspective of the events,” says Robbie, who acts opposite Sebastian Stan ( Captain America: Civil War) as Gillooly. “It led to a lot of arguments between Sebastian and me.” Playful arguments, Stan clarifies: “We would both look at each other like, ‘Oh, Jesus, who have we become?’ ” Robbie and Stan met their real-life counterparts, but while Stan sat down with Gillooly so he could study his mannerisms— “I wanted to see how he looked when he smiled,” the actor says—robbie opted not to meet Harding until she had finished developing the role on her own. She pored over hours of footage of Harding at different stages in her life. “It took months, because every time I thought I’d seen everything, I’d dig a little further and find something else,” Robbie says. “To see her vulnerability when she was young, her defiance when she was in her early 20s,
her defensiveness post-incident, and then her bitterness later in life was just an incredible arc to map out.”
Janney never met the real Lavona— Rogers couldn’t find her, Janney says, and Harding didn’t know where she was—so she drew from the few on-camera interviews Lavona had done. “The fact that she did an interview in a fur coat spoke volumes to me about who she was and how she wanted to be seen,” Janney says. “I saw a lot of hurt there, and I find that I don’t need to see her. Lavona
“It’s not I, Nancy. It’s I, Tonya” —writer Steven Rogers on the film’s focus
would have confused me more if I’d met her.”
For their part, Gillespie and Rogers made sure to document the source of every piece of information in the film. “Everything was vetted by lawyers,” Rogers says. “I had to show all the research, every documentary, every article, and then back that up with more.” Adds Gillespie: “My bible was Steven’s script. I would say to him, ‘Did this happen?’ And the answer usually was ‘This is what Tonya said.’ ”
Whether I, Tonya tells the version that’s true in the absolute sense of the word, however, is hard to say. “It’s 100 per cent accurate to the truth, to Tonya’s truth, to Jeff’s truth,” Robbie says. “Every scene is something that they said happened.
Everything. But how close is it to reality?” Robbie laughs. “We’ll never know. I mean, I’ve got no idea.”