The performance Margot Robbie didn’t think she could pull off: “No chance, no way”
It would be unreasonable to assume an actor can go through their entire career without experiencing a shred of self-doubt every now and again, with Margot Robbie left daunted by the prospect of embodying a character that some of the all-time greats had previously played.
She had every reason to be confident in her abilities, though, with Robbie’s rise nothing short of meteoric. Less than two years after she wrapped up her 355-episode stint on the local soap opera Neighbours, the Australian landed her star-making turn in Martin Scorsese’s The Wolf of Wall Street.
She’d then strike box office gold alongside Will Smith twice in quick succession through crime caper Focus and comic book blockbuster Suicide Squad before I, Tonya changed everything. The first film she produced, it earned Robbie an Academy Award nomination for ‘Best Actress’, and confirmed beyond all doubt that she had the dramatic heft to go along with her radiant star wattage.
It was an incredible amount of success to experience in such a short amount of time, with a challenging part preying on Robbie’s insecurities when she agreed to play Queen Elizabeth I opposite Sairoise Ronan’s title character in the biographical period drama Mary Queen of Scots.
Disappearing into the part through makeup and prosthetics, it was a performance-driven picture that hinged on the two-handed between the leads. Needless to say, Robbie was in excellent form, but before Mary Queen of Scots had even been released, she wasn’t completely convinced she was up to the task.
“She is an incredibly iconic and historic figure,” Robbie informed Net-a-Porter. “She’s been portrayed onscreen by some of the world’s greatest actresses, including Cate Blanchett and Judi Dench. Who am I to think that I could join that legacy? So I initially thought, ‘No chance, no way’. I didn’t think I could pull it off.”
There was definitely an element of risk, with Dench winning an Oscar for ‘Best Supporting Actress’ for playing the character in Shakespeare in Love, while Blanchett earned two ‘Best Actress’ nods for Shekhar Kapur’s Elizabeth and its sequel The Golden Age, which is barely scratching the surface of the talented performers to have inhabited the monarch.
Glenda Jackson, Helen Mirren, Bette Davis, Jean Simmons, Vanessa Redgrave, and Helen McCrory are just some of the names to have portrayed Elizabeth I before Robbie did, but she more than held up her end of the bargain to dispel any doubts that she didn’t have what it takes to do justice to such a notable historical figure.
Those are mighty big shoes to be stepping into, even for an Oscar-nominated A-lister, but Robbie had nothing to worry about when her work ended up with yet more praise being heaped upon her shoulders.
