Skating towards glory
Margot Robbie had never heard of the ice skater Tonya Harding but she jumped at the chance to portray her, writes James Croot.
Margot Robbie has an admission to make – she’d never heard of Tonya Harding before she started working on a movie about her life.
Now, the Australian actress could be about to win a Golden Globe for playing the troubled Olympic skater.
To be fair, the Queensland-born Robbie was only three when Harding hit the headlines for being implicated in an attack on her US team-mate and rival Nancy Kerrigan, but it still seems strange to hear her suggest that she didn’t know the scandalous events were a true story when she first read Steven Rogers’ script.
Speaking in early September, two days after I, Tonya received a standing ovation at its world premiere at the Toronto Film Festival, the charismatic Robbie also confesses she knew nothing about the world of figure skating. ‘‘In hindsight though, I think looking at it with completely fresh eyes was a really good thing because I didn’t read the script with any preconceived notions.’’
Dressed in a gingham shirt and jeans, a relaxed Robbie reveals that as soon as she finished reading she knew she wanted to play Harding and was determined it would be the first movie made under her newly formed production banner LuckyChap Entertainment.
‘‘It is probably the best script I’ve ever read. I loved it, it was so original. So often when you’re putting projects together everyone needs comparisons – ‘it’s like a mix between this and this’. But this movie was so hard to pin down and that was exciting. To look at it and know there were so many avenues you could go down to make it. Also knowing that there were so many ways to do it wrong and only so many ways to do it right was terrifying – and exciting. Every element that came on board had to be perfect, or we were going to make a mess.’’
Fortunately, I, Tonya is far from a mess. In fact, it’s one of the most audacious, subversive and darkly comic movies released in the past year. As Variety‘s Owen Gleiberman summarised, ‘‘It’s a serious blast, with a plot that zigs and zags and a cast of characters who are so eccentrically scuzzy that maybe no one could have dreamed them up’’.
Taking on the role of producer also meant a weird role reversal for the 27-year-old Robbie. She knew she had the part and now had to audition prospective directors.
‘‘That was a really fun, interesting process. We had a 150-person long list of directors at the start. We’d look at their previous work and get an idea of what they were hoping they could achieve or do with certain material.’’
Robbie says that knowing that their eventual choice Craig Gillespie had done Lars and the Real Girl (a 2007 Ryan Gosling starrer where he begins a relationship with a blow-up doll) was what really sold her on him.
‘‘I love that film, but it also navigates that tone between the drama and the comedy in a subtle but sophisticated and relatable way, which is hard to do. It was a situation that could have seemed absurd, but felt genuine, and you became emotionally invested in it. That’s what we wanted somebody to be able to do with this material and so few people can pull that off. We looked – trust me.’’ A sit down with Gillespie confirmed Robbie’s belief that he was the right man for the job.
‘‘He had clear, concise answers and practical solutions for finding tone.’OK, in that moment I would cut to a mid-shot and have no music telling the audience how to feel about it – in that way I’d make them feel uncomfortable’.
‘‘He also introduced the breakingthe-fourth-wall thing. He believed, ‘we need to see her disconnect from the violence she’s experiencing, otherwise it’s really hard to cope with it’.
‘‘Also, I think a lot of people approach these characters in a judgmental, condescending way, looking at them like they’re hilarious – ‘they’re with trash and it’s funny’. That’s not how I felt about it and I didn’t want to work with anyone who felt that way. But with Craig, they were never funny or stupid, they were characters and he cared about them and empathised with them and wanted to humanise their every part.’’
Throwing herself into researching Harding’s history, Robbie says she was indebted to the amount of footage of her that was available – especially the skating competitions.
‘‘It allowed us to see the hair and make-up she had on and we could find the same nail polish, as well as replicate all the key moments wordfor-word and moment-for-moment.’’
However, she hastens to add that she wasn’t interested in replicating Harding’s every feature.
‘‘It was more about embodying the spirit of Tonya. We tried to lean into the look, but we weren’t going to let that be a distraction for what was happening in the scene. Even if we had the money and the time, which we didn’t, to do a million prosthetics on my face so I looked exactly like Tonya, I don’t think we would have because you can’t act when everyone is going, ‘oh, interesting – there’s a nose piece’. This story was about the relationship and the situation. If you got too caught up in the look of it, you wouldn’t be paying attention to the right things.’’
Robbie though was determined to make the skating look convincing. Four months of training, five days a week, were testament to that.
‘‘I was home last Christmas and everyone was like, ‘we’re going to the beach’, and I was like, ‘I have to drive up to Brisbane to go train right now – like I did yesterday, like I will tomorrow’. It gave me a world of appreciation for what figure skaters do, especially every time my alarm went off at 5am and I was already bruised. It’s a hard sport and I saw just a snapshot of that and I thought it was incredibly difficult, but once you get good at it, it’s incredibly fun.’’
What wasn’t fun though was herniating a disc in her neck while trying to recreate part of Harding’s famous triple axel.
‘‘I was on a stunt rig shooting one of the facial close-ups when it happened. Look, I could train for 10 years and still not do it. We couldn’t even get a skating double to do it. No one can do the triple axel – it’s like the holy grail.’’
But as well as regular stints on the physio table, Robbie has spent part of the past 12 months working on her next project – playing Queen Elizabeth I opposite Saoirse Ronan in Mary Queen of Scots (which is scheduled to appear in New Zealand cinemas in September). She says it was fantastic to play someone the ‘‘polar opposite’’ to Harding.
‘‘The Tonya I play was so reactionary, in the moment, and so raw. She felt everything when it happened. I feel Queen Elizabeth was the opposite. She’s got her walls up, doesn’t let anything get to her because she’s cut herself off from that humanity. Tonya has humanity in spades – she feels and she hurts.’’
After advance screenings in select cinemas January 19-21, will begin screening nationwide on January 25.
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I, Tonya