Margot Robbie names her favourite book of all time: “This book means everything to me”
Since making her breakthrough performance in Martin Scorsese’s The Wolf of Wall Street opposite Leonardo Dicaprio, Margot Robbie has become one of the biggest names in Hollywood. The last decade has seen her take on roles as super-villains, historical figures, and, most recently, the title role in Greta Gerwig’s blockbuster, Barbie.
While she was honing her acting CV, Robbie also ventured into production, co-founding LuckyChap Entertainment. The company has produced several films which have starred Robbie, including I, Tonya and the record-breaking Barbie. Between her prolific acting portfolio and her excursions into production, it’s safe to say that Robbie has read a fair few scripts in her time.
In fact, the importance of script reading in her job has changed her attitude towards reading in general. Growing up, she was obsessed with Harry Potter and The Famous Five series, but now, as she recalls in an interview with Chanel, “my reading and my relationship to books has changed because I read so much for work. It’s really hard to read a book without thinking about it in a work sense.”
Mainly, Robbie reads scripts, which she suggests is a “good format”, but one which slows her down: “It takes me about two hours, maybe three hours, to read a script. I’m a pretty slow reader.” Nonetheless, Robbie was more than willing to give up the answer to her favourite book of all time, which she named Mitch Albom’s The Five People You Meet in Heaven, before stating: “This book means everything to me. I love it.”
Published in 2003, The Five People You Meet in Heaven follows protagonist Eddie’s journey through the afterlife as he confronts five people from his past. In an attempt to explain her love for the book, Robbie declares, “I’ll read the first line of it, hold on. I don’t know if this will help”.
She goes on to deliver the first line, which reads: “This is a story about a man named Eddie and it begins at the end, with Eddie dying in the sun. It might seem strange to start a story with an ending. But all endings are also beginnings. We just don’t know it at the time.”
Robbie seems unable to put her love for the novel into words, simply declaring: “I don’t know why. It’s just a really beautiful book”.
Detailing further, she explains, “Eddie is this old man and he’s got the love of his life who’s not there anymore. I don’t know. I’m not good at articulating my feelings about this book. I just have a lot of feelings about it.”
Robbie also names The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway and Animals by Emma Jane Unsworth amongst her favourite reads.
It’s fitting that Robbie would pick a novel that is enchanting and thoughtful, like much of her own filmography. From the pink-fuelled block-busting Barbie to the exploration of time travel in About Time, many of Robbie’s films contain elements of philosophy.
