‘A Big Bold Beautiful Journey’: The movie Margot Robbie called “the most magical experience”
Arguably, making any kind of movie is a magical experience. The very point of the movies is to suspend our disbelief and grant us entrance into a world where anything is possible. The very act of movie-going is magical. If anybody knows this fact, it’s superstar Margot Robbie, who has been in her fair share of incredible projects.
There’s a different intensity to the magical, the fantastical, in different kinds of films. A brutal piece of realism is less “magical” than a deep dive into an enchanted forest, say, if we are equating magic with a reality existing far from our own.
Take Robbie’s 2019 movie Bombshell, a biographical drama that depicts three women at a major American TV news network who risk everything to expose the toxic work culture perpetuated by their powerful boss. This might be way less mystical than Robbie’s work in Barbie, where her protagonist helms from an entirely surreal and fabricated world.
One of the most magical movie-going experiences I have ever had was watching Robbie twist and twirl in the 2022 blockbuster Babylon. The cinema was full, my friends were late, so I spent the first triumphant, dazzling 20 minutes swivelling my head to keep one eye at all times on the door. Even still, I fell into the film headfirst, barely noticing when they shuffled apologetically into their seats beside me. That movie is arguably all about the magic of the movies.
The grand sunset scene, in which Brad Pitt’s character, along with hundreds of other extras, must race against the clock for the perfect sunset shot, is made of magic. Thousands of things are happening at once. There is a bizarre spirituality to the chaos, when it becomes evident that the moment is meta because, to imbue that perfect moment with such hysteria, those on the set of the movie were doing the same thing. Chasing the sun. Life mirrors art mirrors life mirrors magic.
For Robbie, who has been in at least 30 mainstream movie projects (and counting!), it might be difficult to delineate just which experience reigns supreme. We’d forgive her that. However, Robbie has said with certainty which film made her feel the most surreal, the most far from life.
Casting my vote for Babylon aside, the movie that takes the crown for the “most magical experience” is a movie neither I nor you have seen yet. The upcoming project, A Big Bold Beautiful Journey, stars Colin Farrell and Margot Robbie as two strangers who come together on an imaginative and unbelievable journey that allows them insight into their past, present, and future.
In all fairness, the movie’s ultimate aim is to take viewers on a magical journey, so this makes sense. The film has a stellar supporting cast that includes Lily Rabe, Kevin Kline, and Phoebe Waller-Bridge. The whole experience was overwhelmingly spiritual for the two main leads: “If audiences feel even a tiny slice of how magical it felt making this movie, then they’ll have the most incredible experience in the theatre,” Robbie told Vanity Fair. “Making this movie was truly one of the most magical experiences of my life.” Cinema-goers can experience this for themselves from September 19th.
