The only director left on Margot Robbie’s bucket list: “The big one I haven’t ticked”
From the moment Margot Robbie jetted over to Hollywood from her native Australia, where she’d spent several years as a soap star as a regular main character in Neighbours, she began ticking off filmmakers from her bucket list.
Now, I don’t know if Robbie actually has a physical list that she goes through and ticks off or if she just compiles them in her head, but it’s safe to say that she has checked off a fair few directors over the years with apparent ease, with one of the first being Martin Scorsese. Appearing in The Wolf of Wall Street opposite Leonardo DiCaprio when she was just 22, Robbie soon proved that she had the acting chops to star in a huge film by a Hollywood legend despite her limited experience with feature films.
After an Oscar nomination for I, Tonya and a string of high-profile roles in the likes of Suicide Squad, Robbie started to make her way through a list of impressive auteurs, next ticking off Quentin Tarantino – it seems like she takes an active role in getting what she wants, and in this case, she knew she had to do all that she could to secure herself a part in one of his films.
“I love his movies. Love them,” she told Vogue. “I wrote him and said, ‘I adore your films, and I would love to work with you in some capacity. Or any capacity,’” and just like that, she was cast as Sharon Tate in Once Upon A Time in Hollywood.
Over the years, she has checked more boxes, telling the magazine in another interview, “Greta was on that list for a long time,” and of course, her collaboration with Greta Gerwig resulted in Barbie, which became the highest-grossing movie directed by a female director – the pair made history with the film, which was a cultural phenomenon.
“Damien [Chazelle] was on that list for a long time,” she added, in reference to the La La Land director who cast her in Babylon, in which she played a rising star during Hollywood’s transformative late-20s period. Having collaborated with the likes of Emerald Fennell, Wes Anderson, and Kogonada, it seems like she is working her way through a list of filmmakers with distinctive styles that draw her in, and it’s not hard to see why they want the star in their films, too.
There’s one big gaping hole in her resumé, though, and that’s Paul Thomas Anderson. As one of modern cinema’s greatest living filmmakers – I mean, how is it possible to direct as many great movies as he has? – Robbie is gagging to work with him. He’s a versatile director, having made period pieces like There Will Be Blood and Phantom Thread as well as offbeat comedies such as Boogie Nights and Punch-Drunk Love, so what Robbie has in mind for a future collaboration with Anderson is anyone’s guess.
“PTA is the big one I haven’t ticked,” she said, adding that “he knows.” So, maybe a collaboration between the two could be rather imminently on the cards, although he’s still reeling from the success of One Battle After Another, which is currently in the running for ‘Best Picture’ at the Oscars.
It seems likely that something will emerge between the two in the near future, because Robbie seems pretty capable of ticking off every director she so wishes to work with.
