How Margot Robbie’s big break was set up to fail: “It’s obviously not doing well”
It’s easy to underestimate a person’s skills when they make everything look effortless – Margot Robbie is the poster child of this phenomenon.
We all just take it as a given that she is one of the most sought-after stars in Hollywood and one of its most successful business moguls. While Sydney Sweeney struggles to come up with a pronounceable name for her lingerie line and the third richest man in the world sells out his ever-shrinking soul for the Melania documentary, Robbie is breezing across the red carpet while working behind the scenes on no fewer than seven movies.
She isn’t a Hollywood nepo baby or the heir to a vast media corporation. She isn’t married to a long-time producer or even the child of a forgotten character actor. She was born in Australia and raised by a single mother who was a physiotherapist. She got into acting at the basement level and worked her way up, rung by rung, until she’d reached the seemingly impossible heights of the Australian soap opera, Neighbours.
For someone who started her career with no connections or template, this could easily have been the be-all and end-all of success, but, as we now know, Robbie was barely getting started.
Rather than stick around with Neighbours, she took a chance on Hollywood, auditioning for various TV series until she finally caught her big break. Pan Am was a stylish 1960s throwback about flight attendants that had Mad Men aspirations, and Robbie was cast as a young bride who ditches domestic drudgery for the glamour of commercial aviation.
When it premiered in 2011, the show was a success, earning solid reviews and decent viewership numbers, but the network executives, forever slaves to the bottom line, wanted even bigger ratings. As a result, they did what 99% of their ilk does when they have a potential hit on their hands: they fucked it up. Instead of letting the series develop as the showrunners intended, they brought in a host of new writers and announced that they wanted something more akin to The Real Housewives than HBO.
“After the fifth episode, you see this abrupt change in content,” Robbie told Vanity Fair in 2016. “If they’re rehiring writers, it’s obviously not doing well.” It was clear to her that Pan Am wasn’t going to make it, and, as usual, she was one step ahead of everyone else. Instead of sticking it out and hoping that the executives knew what they were doing, she went on the hunt for the next opportunity.
This was a risky move. Even before she landed the part in Pan Am, Robbie had had to sign a contract committing to as many as seven seasons. If the show had been picked up for a second season, she wouldn’t have been able to accept any offers that conflicted with it. The fact that she went ahead and auditioned for Martin Scorsese anyway is a testament to her savviness even at this early stage in Hollywood.
Sure enough, Pan Am was cancelled, and Robbie landed the role of Naomi, the wife of Leonardo DiCaprio’s Jordan Belfort in The Wolf of Wall Street. If there is any moral to the story, it’s that Hollywood execs are almost always wrong and Margot Robbie is (A Big Bold Beautiful Journey aside) almost always right.
