“I hate her”: Margot Robbie’s visceral first reaction to one of her most defining roles
For most actors, revisiting a role is something they would hate to do, as the idea of a franchise, or even a sequel, can often feel like a stagnant pond. A lot of performers would prefer to keep things moving, keep pushing forward into newer and more varied roles, but for Margot Robbie, it’s more complex than that.
When looking at her résumé of characters, it’s obvious that variety is important to her. It seems to be her bread and butter, or her biggest motivation, as in only just over a decade, she’s been a vengeful ice skater, a world-famous doll, a ’60s icon, an animated bunny, a mob wife, and so much more.
Robbie seems to value the shapeshifting side of acting. In 2016, she said she “wants to keep looking for roles where the main interest will be in the character and her importance in driving a story forward”, as the role she played was always the thing of utmost importance when it came to choosing projects. She has no interest in playing one-dimensional, uninteresting figures, and she clearly has no interest in getting stuck in a typecast.
But all that makes it all the more mysterious how and why she connected so much with Harley Quinn, and that’s a mystery to Robbie herself, too.
“When I first read it, I thought, I have nothing in common with her. I hate her,” she admitted. At first glance, the comic book manic bad girl type character seemed exactly like the kind of roles she hated. She’d previously told Women’s Day that she specifically wasn’t interested in characters who were only defined through their connection to male roles, and so the queen to the Joker’s kingdom felt like an odd pick.
However, the more she unpacked Harley Quinn, the more she realised it was quite the opposite, noting, “It was a really tricky one to get my head around. But her motivation was, ‘You guys are doing it, why shouldn’t I? It’s this man’s world, and I’m going to get mine’. And I understand that,” coming to see the character as an empowered one, or at least one she could empower.
“There’s no way I was going to play the damsel in distress,” Robbie had said to Vogue previously about her role in Tarzan, and her view of Harley Quinn was the same. After making the character her own in Suicide Squad, her desire to revisit the role to make Birds of Prey, or the Fantabulous Emancipation of One Harley Quinn, was to give the character exactly that: emancipation.
She wanted to revisit the role to empower it even further, remove her from the context of the Joker, and give her a story and an adventure of her own, snatching the character from the tired hands of her male associates, and letting her stand on her own.
After that, she made it clear that she had no interest in continuing it further or joining a broader DC cinematic universe, like many superhero movie actors get sucked into, and instead, she simply wanted to come back and give Quinn her own story and her own voice, so she could ensure the character was still meeting the actor’s own standards of never just being a girl attached to a boy.
