MEET MARGOT ROBBIE ...
How a driven, glamorous girl from Down Under ended up on top of the world
Who is Margot Robbie?
The easy answer: a 26-year-old Australian actress whose big break came three years ago playing Naomi Lapaglia, Leonardo DiCaprio’s glamorous wife in The Wolf of Wall Street. But poke around beyond that, and things get a little misty.
Turn to a notorious Vanity Fair profile published last month, and you’ll learn, among other tidbits, that she is “tall but only with the help of certain shoes,” perhaps in the same way that she has a trunk, but only with the help of certain elephant costumes.
Robbie is also “beautiful,” the magazine observed, “but in a minor knock-around key, a blue mood, a slow dance” — a much-quoted line when the piece received the piranha treatment on social media.
So why is it — after almost three years in the direct sunlight of movie stardom, during which she became the most talked-about and gazed-at actress in Hollywood — that Robbie still leaves writers and critics floundering? Part of the reason is that we don’t yet know what a Robbie film looks like. While she’s played alongside DiCaprio, Will Smith and Alexander Skarsgard, she’s always been a co-star, support act or glamorous assistant.
In the DC Comics ensemble romp Suicide Squad, Robbie — who plays Harley Quinn, a criminal psychologist turned psychopathic Joker protégé — is unquestionably primus inter pares among her costars, which puts her breakneck rise into sobering perspective.
When I interviewed her in late 2013, just before the release of The Wolf of Wall Street, she told me breathlessly how she’d recently sped halfway around the world for a once-in-a-lifetime audition with Will Smith. Two years later, by the time that film, Focus, was released, she and Smith had equal billing — now, her Harley Quinn is upstaging his Deadshot in every last scrap of Suicide Squad promotional material Warner Bros has cranked out.
Her roles to date suggest she’s a free spirit with boundless confidence and a lip-biting love of mischief — what other kind of unknown actress could bound from a cancelled television series (Pan Am) to stealing Martin Scorsese’s best film in more than a decade? But in person she struck me as a pragmatist and strategist. She spoke about “getting her ducks lined up” during her stint on Neighbours, which meant acquiring a dialogue coach, an agent with strong L.A. connections, a business manager and publicists on either side of the Atlantic.
This “team” knows how high her ambitions run. “I’d rather do two scenes in a Terrence Malick film than every scene in a mediocre film,” she once said. “The team has always been on the same page.”
Yet she’s a very different kind of performer from the other Australia-raised actresses who have thrived under similar circumstances — foremost among them Cate Blanchett, Nicole Kidman and Naomi Watts. (Like Robbie, Watts graduated from Australia’s soap-opera circuit: Robbie was in Neighbours from 200811; Watts appeared on Home and Away in 1991.)
This guild of Australian master emoters are the kind of stars that articulate complex, often contradictory currents of feeling with heart-shattering clarity. It’s hard to picture Robbie doing any of that, and not just because a script has yet to afford her the opportunity to do so. Instead, she’s playing up to a kind of movie-star image we haven’t really seen since the early ’90s, and perhaps didn’t realize how much we missed.
Robbie offers a wry Aussie take on the all-American sex symbol with brains: think Michelle Pfeiffer, Sharon Stone, Kim Basinger and Cameron Diaz. Like those actresses, Robbie glints with a combustible mix of talent, beauty and drive you imagine was simply too much for whatever small town you assume she grew up in. (She grew up on a farm near Queensland’s Gold Coast, one of Australia’s most sprawling urban centres.) The drive part, at least, lives up to the fantasy: her break on Neighbours came after she bombarded the casting director with phone calls.
Nevertheless, those looks mean she often plays a prize for leading men. Her eye-catching international screen debut came in the Richard Curtis rom-com About Time as Charlotte, a well-spoken Home Counties hottie much drooled-over by Domhnall Gleeson. And when her character in The Wolf of Wall Street first sheds her clothes for DiCaprio’s smirking stockbroker Jordan Belfort, her naked body glints like polished gold: no mere trophy girlfriend, but a living, breathing Sex Oscar. The scene was shot at 9 a.m., but when a crew member offered Robbie a little Dutch courage, she accepted. “Acting 101,” she joked. “Three shots of tequila and you’ll be fine.”
Robbie’s trick is playing characters like Harley Quinn with a wink that allows us to enjoy their throwback glamour and raunch without trashing our millennial moral credentials in the process.