2023-07-31 15:09:17
by Barbara Visentin
Transformist, producer, no social star: from her debut with Scorsese to the Oscars, the consecration of the Australian actress was close
There is a moment in the film «Barbie» in which the narrative voice, which in the original version is that of Helen Mirren, breaks the «fourth wall» and addresses the authors directly: «Note to the filmmakers, Margot Robbie is the person wrong to write if you want to give this speech», he admonishes them. It happens when she Barbie, in all her glory, has an identity crisis and she claims she doesn’t feel beautiful enough or good enough, despite the fact that she looks almost perfect. The off-screen joke, greeted in the hall with approving laughter, gives voice to the common thought: how can Margot Robbie have the same insecurities as us mere mortals? Yet she, the Australian actress manages to be nice and empathetic even where she risked not being credible.
«Barbie» is the film of the summer, but above all it is the film by Margot Robbie. It’s hers because she fills it with magnetism and skill, but it’s hers too because she made it, as a producer before as a protagonist. Robbie is experiencing a golden moment, which also arrived after a series of important roles which, at 33, make her a Hollywood diva in the most contemporary sense: feminist, quick-change artist, entrepreneur as well as actress. “She’s stunning at everything she does,” Martin Scorsese said in 2017, when he featured her for Time’s 100 Most Influential People of the Year list.
On the other hand, it was precisely the role in his «The Wolf of Wall Street», four years earlier, that launched her, thanks to an audition in which she had improvisedly slapped Leonardo DiCaprio. To perform the film’s nude scene, Robbie confessed that he had overcome his nervousness by drinking “a couple of shots of tequila”. And she too was convinced that, as a 22-year-old newcomer alongside a star, she would go unnoticed: “At the time I thought ‘no one will notice me, no matter what I do in this film because everyone will be focused on Leo'”.
That didn’t happen and with the money he earned on that occasion he also paid off his mother’s house loan, to whom, he explained, he owes everything. Born in Queensland, the third of four children, Robbie had little contact with her father: her parents separated from her when she was five years old and she was raised by her mother, a physiotherapist, spending a lot of time on the farm of grandparents. Her first acclaim came with «Neighbours», an Australian soap opera in which she had to make just a few appearances, but she soon became a regular member of the cast.
Then, the leap to Hollywood and the list of characters, always different and increasingly important, who began to arrive in chains: the evil and psychopathic Harley Quinn from «Suicide Squad», the controversial figure skater Tonya Harding, the austere Elizabeth I in “Mary Queen of Scots”. Just «Tonya», from 2017, brought her the first Oscar nomination (the second came with «Bombshell») and was also the first success of LuckyChap Entertainment, a production company she founded together with her husband, Tom Ackerley and their respective childhood friends.
The two, married since 2016, met on a set and became a couple in life and work: “I am a supporter of doing business together with your partner and marriage is a lot of fun,” she said in one of the rare statements about his private life. With LuckyChap, she prefers female stories, including films such as “A Promising Woman” and series such as “Maid”, and aims for creative control of her work.
With «Barbie» she demonstrated it fully: it was she who convinced Mattel to give total freedom to the director Greta Gerwig, she to want to work with Gerwig, she – as she said laughing – to «write herself» as the protagonist, even if it wasn’t originally meant to be. So now she is everywhere: in the absence of official social accounts, she has dozens of dedicated pages, managed by #robbers, her fans. Her beauty is put under the magnifying glass in hundreds of articles that hypothesize the most diverse (and never confirmed) aesthetic procedures, as well as used as a model by those asking for a touch-up (in 2020 a clinic published a survey according to which her face was the most requested). A Margot-mania to which she responds with humor and affection: a video from 2022 has resurfaced these days in which she stops to talk to a deaf fan using sign language. Well yes, she knows that too. More than a doll.
July 31, 2023 (change July 31, 2023 | 09:08)
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