The movie Margot Robbie was warned against making: “It’s going to be a disaster”
As soon as Margot Robbie started to gain popularity in Hollywood, appearing in The Wolf of Wall Street to great acclaim in 2013, she set her sights on something bigger. Having cut her teeth in her native Australia by starring in over 350 episodes of Neighbours, by the time the actor started her career in America, she was already charging towards behind-the-scenes roles as well as those in front of the camera, determined to carve out a space for female stories, predominantly made by women.
Alongside her husband Tom Ackerley, Josey McNamara, and Sophia Kerr, Robbie founded LuckyChap Entertainment in 2014, shortly after she had made waves in the industry with her performance as Naomi in Martin Scorsese’s film. She was just 22 years old and had only appeared in a handful of feature films beforehand, but she gave a performance that demonstrated her innate talent for acting, earning a nomination from the MTV Movie Awards for ‘Best Breakthrough Performance’.
Over the course of the next few years, Robbie appeared in several movies like Z For Zacariah, Suite Française, The Legend of Tarzan, and Suicide Squad, cementing herself as a notable new star. However, in 2017, she took on a leading role in I, Tonya, LuckyChap’s first production, which earned her an Academy Award nomination, while Alison Janney took home ‘Best Supporting Actress’.
Based on the true story of the figure skater Tonya Harding, the Craig Gillespie-directed film was well-received and marked the start of an impressive tenure for LuckyChap. However, Robbie remembers the hesitancy she felt from some people when she revealed her plans to co-produce and star in a biopic about Harding and the attack on her rival, Nancy Kerrigan, which took place in 1994.
In an interview with the Oscars, Robbie revealed that when she was planning Barbie, she felt some resistance from industry people, who thought that making the movie was a bad idea. However, it was her experience of making I, Tonya, that encouraged her to pursue Barbie regardless because people had similarly questioned I, Tonya, only for it to earn significant acclaim. She revealed that there was “a lot of squealing from everyone” when Barbie was announced, yet “we kind of had that on a smaller scale when we did I, Tonya. Everyone was like, ‘Don’t do that. Don’t touch that. It’s going to be a disaster.’”
Robbie knew that Harding’s story was a fascinating one that could be portrayed well on the big screen, and she was certainly right. The film also starred Sebastian Stan, Julianne Nicholson, Caitlin Carver, and Paul Walter Hauser and made a significant gross of $53.9million against a budget of $11m.
With the success of I, Tonya under her belt, Robbie and her company have gone on to make various other movies to mixed success, from Birds of Prey and Saltburn to Terminal and My Old Ass. It’s Barbie that remains its biggest hitter, however, with Greta Gerwig’s film earning a whopping $1.446 billion, making it the highest-grossing movie ever made by a female director.
