The offbeat movie that inspired Margot Robbie to be an actor
As an Australian actor, Margot Robbie began her acting career with a familiar rite of passage that countless other Antipodean performers have undertaken during their own formative years on-screen, after starring in over 300 episodes of long-running soap opera Neighbours.
Guy Pearce, Russell Crowe, all three of the Hemsworth brothers, Kylie Minogue, Alan Dale, and Bella Heathcote are just a smattering of the future stars to have shown up on Ramsay Street at one time or another, and that’s without mentioning the raft of well-known names to have popped up in sun-kissed rival Home and Away, either.
While Robbie’s early days in the profession walked a path that many of her contemporaries have trodden before, it’s hard to imagine the movie that inspired her to become an actor is held up by any of her peers as one that lit the touchpaper on their ambitions to grave screens both big and small.
Given her status as an A-lister, household name, powerhouse producer, and two-time Academy Award nominee, it would be easy to assume that a seminal classic would be the film to open her eyes to the possibility of taking up acting as a full-time occupation and finding superstardom under the bright lights of Hollywood.
Instead, Robbie admitted to The Guardian that it was an altogether more whimsical and broad comedic caper that saw her begin to dream big: “I would love to say: Hiroshima mon amour, In the Realm of the Senses or 2001: A Space Odyssey, but that’s not the case,” she said. “The first film that got me interested in this business was George of the Jungle with Brendan Fraser. Don’t ask me why but I loved that film.”
The 1997 favourite was certainly a big hit that proved popular with audiences around the world, but with the best will in the world towards anyone and everyone involved in the production, it’s not exactly a movie that’s been designated a must-see masterpiece or the potential to inspire future generations of talent on either side of the camera to pursue their ambitions.
It’s a light-hearted, fun-filled, and frothy adventure bolstered by Fraser’s charming charisma in the title role, which was apparently more than enough to have Robbie convinced she could become a major name in Tinseltown. In her defence, she’d have very recently turned seven years old when George of the Jungle was released in July of 1997, which is no doubt one of the many reasons why it stuck with her.
Things eventually came full circle for Robbie when she starred as Jane Clayton in The Legend of Tarzan, with Edgar Rice Burroughs’ literary creation the inspiration behind George of the Jungle‘s parodical approach to the tropes and trappings of the character, underlining that life really is full of the most unexpected coincidences.
