Margot Robbie names the most unfairly treated movie of her career: “I am still saying that”
Every actor will experience their fair share of ups and downs during their careers, but befitting her status as one of the biggest and most consistent A-listers the industry has at its disposal, Margot Robbie has been lucky enough to see the hits drastically outweigh the misses.
Excluding voiceover roles and cameo appearances, Robbie has made less than 25 feature films in the years since her debut in the little-seen 2008 revenge thriller Vigilante. That’s not a massive number of credits, even if there’s plenty of quality to match the relative dearth of quantity.
Robbie’s most notable successes include her breakthrough performance in Martin Scorsese’s The Wolf of Wall Street, the massively profitable but still turgid comic book adaptation Suicide Squad, her Academy Award-nominated turn in I, Tonya, which announced her as a producer to be reckoned with, the acclaimed drama Bombshell, Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, and the all-conquering cultural phenomenon that was Barbie.
There was a string of flops in alarmingly quick succession, but it didn’t manage to derail her momentum. Her subsequent outings as Harley Quinn in The Suicide Squad and Birds of Prey bombed, while David O Russell’s Amsterdam was arguably an even more painful commercial disaster because it was also an unstoppably tedious mystery caper that wasted a ludicrously stacked ensemble cast.
However, the most painful by far was Damien Chazelle’s Babylon. On paper, it was an awards season heavyweight waiting to happen: the filmmaker was white hot after La La Land won six Oscars from 13 nominations, including ‘Best Director’, and the prospect of a debauched dive into the excesses of old Hollywood felt nailed-on to take off among critics and the ticket-buying public.
Instead, Babylon lost an absolute fortune, consigned Chazelle to directors’ jail, and generally did an unfathomably terrible job of living up to the hype that had been built around it. The movie does have its ardent admirers, but it also has its vociferous detractors. Based on her comments, there are no prizes for guessing which camp Robbie falls into.
“I don’t get it either,” she replied when asked on the Talking Pictures why people why so many people despised Babylon so much. “I know I am biased because I am very close to the project, and I obviously believe in it, but I still can’t figure out why people hated it. I wonder if, in 20 years, people are going to be like, ‘Wait, Babylon didn’t do well at the time?’ Like when you hear that Shawshank Redemption was a failure at the time, and you’re like, ‘How is that possible?'”
While there are already whisperings of Babylon eventually taking its place as a cult classic, it’s no Shawshank Redemption. The seminal prison drama is one of the most beloved films that’s ever going to be made, which is miles out of the reach for Chazelle’s self-indulgent descent into hedonistic madness and despair. There’s a high chance more people will like it as time wears on, but it feels too overtly polarising to ever mount a comeback as a genuinely underappreciated gem.
