Margot Robbie on ice
On Jan 6, 1994, figure-skating champion and Olympic gold-medal favourite Nancy Kerrigan finished a practice session at Cobo Arena in Detroit. As she stepped off the ice, however, a man came out of nowhere to viciously club her right knee. As the assailant fled, Kerrigan crumpled in agony, screaming: “Why, why, why?”
As the world soon learned, the assault had been planned by Jeff Gillooly, ex-husband of one of Kerrigan’s rivals, Tonya Harding. Its purpose was to force Kerrigan off the Olympic team and open a space for Harding.
“I was four years old when the incident happened,” actress Margot Robbie said. “The truth is, I had never even heard of Tonya Harding or Nancy Kerrigan until I read the script.”
Now the 27-year-old Australian is onscreen as Harding in Craig Gillespie’s new film, I, Tonya, (in Thai cinemas this week).
“I had no preconceived notions,” Robbie said with a laugh during an interview in Toronto. “When I did read the script, I thought, ‘This writer is out of his mind!’. It was so crazy, bizarre and quirky that I was sure it was a work of pure fiction.
“When I realised it was all true, I kept saying, ‘Wow’,” she said. “Then I turned the page and said, ‘No, I don’t believe it’. If anything, what was on the page was subtle about certain things.”
Robbie both stars in and produced I, Tonya, which has spurred early talk of an Oscar nomination as Best Actress.
The film traces Harding’s climb to the top ranks of American figure skating, only to be eclipsed by Kerrigan (Caitlyn Carver). It was jealousy and the hope to take an empty place on the 1994 US Olympic team that allegedly led her and Gillooly (Sebastian Stan) to plot against Kerrigan.
In the aftermath of the attack, Harding was indeed named to the team, but Kerrigan recovered and the two both skated at the Olympics in Lillehammer, with Kerrigan finishing second and Harding eighth behind gold-medal winner Oksana Baiul. Subsequent revelations of Harding’s involvement in the attack led to her being banned from professional skating.
Writer Steven Rogers bought the rights to Harding’s story and interviewed both Harding and Gillooly, whose often-contradictory points of view are the basis of his script. Looking for material for her own production company, Robbie came across the I, Tonya script and was smitten.
“I prepared a huge monologue on why I should play Tonya and why my company should also produce,” Robbie recalled. “Steven said, ‘I think this is a great idea’.”
That left Robbie to face the challenge of actually playing Harding.
“I knew there were so many ways to do this wrong,” she said. “The question became, ‘How do we do this right?’. We needed to make these outrageous, wildly fun, tragic and beautiful characters human.
“We tend to paint people as either villains or heroes, with no middle ground,” Robbie said. “With this movie we wanted to take a deeper look at how these people arrived at this point in their lives. I was so intrigued by Tonya. I became engrossed in her life and watched everything.”
The script required Robbie to age from 15 to 44 onscreen.
“I had never played such a range of ages,” she said. “I had to remember how I was at 15. I was painfully self-conscious about everything. I had braces at that age. Every single time I’d smile, I would suddenly remember I had those braces and cover my smile.
“Then I had to get into Tonya’s head space at age 44,” the actress continued. “The good news is that there were documentaries about her from age 15 on up. I could see how her mannerism changed over the years.”
It was the skating, of course, that was the biggest challenge. Robbie spent five months training with choreographer Sarah Kawahara, who had actually worked with Kerrigan.
“I grew up in a coastal town in Australia where there is no ice,” Robbie said. “I did want to play ice hockey, because I loved the Mighty Ducks films. In fact, I joined an icehockey team when I first moved to America, so I knew a little bit about skating.”
The training was rigorous enough that Robbie herniated a disk in her neck at one point.
“It meant quite a lot of pain,” she said. “There was no padding. But I came back for several hours each day. Christmas Eve, New Year’s Eve, I was at the ice rink training for this film, falling and going home bruised.”
Some of the skating had to be done via digital effects, however.
“It sounds so simple to just hire a stunt double,” Robbie said. “There are only six women in the history of skating who did the triple axel during competition, and none were available for this film.”
Yes, Robbie did talk with Harding in preparing for the role.
“Craig and I flew up to Portland and met with Tonya,” Robbie said. “We only spent a few hours with her, and it was better to keep it that way. Otherwise I might have developed too much empathy for her.
“You feel some responsibility because it’s a real person you’re portraying onscreen,” she continued. “But I didn’t want to play her with judgement. I didn’t want to pull back anything in my performance based on meeting her. All I wanted to do was try to figure out why she did what she did.
“I really tried to differentiate between the Tonya in real life and who we had on the screen,” Robbie said. “I didn’t want my performance to be confined to the real person.”
Gillespie let her have the room to let loose in portraying the volatile relationship between Harding and her ex, the actress added.
“Craig gave us ultimate freedom on the set,” Robbie said. “Literally, the take would keep going and we’d get more and more crazy. We kind of lost our minds at times. There were holes in the walls and pictures were broken.
“It was phenomenal,” she said, laughing. “We got so carried away that I genuinely forgot we were on a film set. Nothing makes me more exhilarated than forgetting where I am. We got into a massive fight during one
of the takes. I ended up storming off the set onto the real street outside. He was coming after me screaming, ‘Where are you going?’. He even called me ‘Margot!’.
“It was all so ridiculous.” Strangest of all, perhaps, was a private screening for Harding herself.
“Personally, I could not watch someone distil my life into 100 pages of a script,” she said. “But Tonya saw the movie and was so gracious and complimentary about what we pulled off. She was quite happy. She was even kind when we talked about my skating.”
Robbie grew up in Queensland, Australia, on a farm owned by her grandparents. As a teenager she moved to Melbourne to pursue an acting career. Early credits included the film Vigilante (2008) and the soap opera Neighbours (2008-2011).
The ABC series Pan Am (2011-2012) brought her to America. That show quickly fizzled, but Robbie scored on the big screen playing sexy Naomi Lapaglia opposite Leonardo DiCaprio in Martin Scorsese’s The Wolf Of Wall Street (2013).
“I got the call for Wolf and walked in wearing my street clothes,” she recalled. “The casting director told me to go to the nearest SoHo store and buy a tight dress and the highest heels I could find, to actually look like the character in the film.”
Robbie returned in stilettos and got the role.
“I’m sure I threw those heels to the back of my closet,” she said. “I love to be comfortable.”
That performance led to roles in such films as About Time (2013), Focus (2015), Z For Zachariah (2015), The Legend Of Tarzan (2016) and Suicide Squad (2016), in which Robbie played the gleefully psychotic Harley Quinn.
She was seen earlier this year in Goodbye Christopher Robin (2017) as the glamorous mother of Christopher Robin Milne, and next year will star in Mary Queen Of Scots,
playing Queen Elizabeth I to Saoirse Ronan’s Mary Stuart.
Robbie is married to British director Tom Ackerley. They met on the set of the war drama Suite Francaise (2014) and tied the knot in Australia in December 2016. The couple lives in London, where they’re often stopped by her rabid fans, who dub themselves “Robbers”.
Robbie will be seen as Harley Quinn in at least two more DC Universe movies, Suicide Squad 2 and Gotham City Sirens.
She’s ready, in part because she retained one prop from Suicide Squad.
“I do have Harley’s baseball bat next to my bed, in case an intruder breaks in,” Robbie said with a laugh. “I imagine the robber looking shocked, me grabbing the bat and then saying, ‘You picked the wrong house!’.”
I didn’t want to play Tonya with judgement