The 2011 character Margot Robbie wanted to die: “I asked if they would kill me”
Now that she’s not only an A-list star but a powerful producer in her own right, if Margot Robbie wants one of her characters to die, then you can bet they won’t be making it to the end credits.
When you’re a three-time Academy Award nominee, played the title role in a cultural phenomenon that earned over a billion dollars at the box office, landing a ‘Best Picture’ nomination in the process, and backed the Oscar-winning Promising Young Woman from the start, you get a fair bit of clout.
As far as female stars in Hollywood go, Robbie is in fairly rarefied air, in that she can build and develop passion projects from the ground up, whether she wants to act in them or not, and when she does appear onscreen, her going rate is a few million dollars, at the very least.
It’s a far cry from where she was a decade and a half ago, but based on nothing but history and inarguable facts, there was always a chance that the Australian would end up taking Hollywood by storm in one way or another, since she served her apprenticeship on the long-running soap opera, Neighbours.
Alongside its spiritual bedfellow, Home and Away, the two small-screen staples have spent decades providing America with breakout star after breakout star, with everyone from Heath Ledger and Guy Pearce to multiple Hemsworths and Russell Crowe, via Ben Mendelsohn, Samara Weaving, and more.
Robbie spent three years and over 350 episodes honing her skills as Donna Freedman, but when she realised she’d started to outgrow the show and fancied doing what so many of her predecessors had done by heading off to the United States to see if she could hack it on the other side of the world, she wanted to go out in a blaze of glory.
“I told them I was going to move to America, and then I asked if they would kill me off in like a really big way,” Robbie admitted. “They said no, because, you know, ‘If things don’t work out in America, we want you to be able to come back and play the role again’. So, my characters also moved to America, incidentally.'”
Obviously, things did work out in America, with Robbie quickly securing her breakthrough role when she was cast in Martin Scorsese’s The Wolf of Wall Street, and she’s been on an upward trajectory ever since. Of course, even if she had been killed off in Neighbours, it’s not as if soaps don’t have a habit of bringing back dead characters, usually through preposterously far-fetched explanations.
It’s just as well that Donna wasn’t bumped off in spectacular fashion, since it allowed Robbie to make a return to Ramsay Street in 2022 for an all-star episode that was billed as Neighbours‘ grand finale. It was back on the air a little over a year later, though, so maybe the showrunners should have used the opportunity to kill her, seeing as it’s not likely that she’ll be coming back again.
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