“I owe so much”: the one role Margot Robbie will always be “eternally grateful” for
Margot Robbie had quite a remarkable start in the world of acting; remarkable because once she’d actually made up her mind about what she wanted to do, things happened pretty quickly.
After all, once Robbie graduated at 17 and moved to Melbourne to pursue acting full-time, it wasn’t long before she landed the one job that gave her a significant foot in the door, bagging a guest role on the Australian flagship soap opera, Neighbours. Here, she nurtured the focus and determination she’d already held from growing up in a like-minded family, embarking on what would unknowingly become a three-year stint that defined her entire approach to acting.
From there, Robbie knew pretty much instantly that she wanted to try to break into Hollywood, and it wasn’t long before others recognised her potential. Just two years after leaving Neighbours, Robbie earned her breakthrough as Naomi Lapaglia in Martin Scorsese’s epic biopic The Wolf of Wall Street after wowing the entire room during the audition by “giving Leonardo DiCaprio a thunderclap of a slap on the face”, as Scorsese later recalled.
But this has sort of been part and parcel of Robbie’s success since long before the high-stakes auditions and last-minute decisions that more often than not helped rather than hindered her journey to becoming one of the biggest household names in Hollywood.
After all, Robbie always had a natural talent for authenticity in any role she bagged, even ones like Naomi, a role she later admitted she “hated” because they had “nothing in common”. But in those scenarios, Robbie navigates the uncertainty by having a few tricks up her sleeve that she uses to make sure she can step into any character in any world. Most of which are simple, proactive measures that ensure she doesn’t completely fall flat on her face any time she sets foot on a movie set.
The biggest one is her mantra about doing things with “total conviction”. In Robbie’s view, if you half-ass something, you’re going to end up looking silly. So, if there’s a scene she’s not entirely sure about, or which requires her to be more emotionally available, she decides to go all out and really give herself over to the scene, because anything less would make her feel embarrassed and likely make others around her feel that way, too.
Another is her ability to cry on command. Lots of actors can cry on command to varying degrees of success, but most of them use similar techniques, thinking of something sad or triggering to switch on the waterworks. Robbie, on the other hand, takes a different approach, cutting down on the number of hours of sleep she gets in the days leading up to a big scene to make sure that, when the time comes, she can switch on the crocodile tears with no issues.
Another trick is more of a sensory thing: Robbie feels more immersed in certain characters when she can attach a smell to them. For example, with Harley Quinn, she bought “a super tacky, cheap” small-brand perfume with a skull on it from a supermarket drugstore because she felt it was perfect for the character and would allow her to get under her skin more easily.
And yet, while these are all reasons why Robbie became one of the most celebrated names in Hollywood, most of them are also skills she learned back on Neighbours, when she was able to develop her acting style and figure out exactly what sorts of approaches worked for her. As she later reflected, she “[owes] so much to Neighbours” because “it gave me a real chance to work on my craft.”
She concluded, “It was the perfect training for Hollywood, and I will always be eternally grateful.”
