Bombshell: The role Margot Robbie accepted without reading the full script
Although she is best known for her role as Naomi in Martin Scorsese’s masterpiece The Wolf of Wall Street and as Harley Quinn in the Suicide Squad franchise, Margot Robbie is much more multifaceted than those titles would suggest. The actor has delivered a host of more substantial roles, starring in works that are far removed from the outlandish worlds of 1980s Wall Street and DC Comics.
Most notably, one of Robbie’s greatest performances came as figure skater Tonya Harding in 2017’s I, Tonya. However, the most vital story of her filmography came in the form of 2019’s Bombshell. Strangely though, it is one of the more overlooked moments in her career so far.
Directed by Jay Roach and written by Christopher Randolph, the movie is based on one of the most significant events in the #MeToo movement. Alongside Charlize Theron and Nicole Kidman, Robbie stars as one of three women who work at Fox News and fight to expose the company’s CEO, the late Roger Ailes, for sexual harassment. This would eventually spell the end of his decades-long career at the network.
Only a month before the film’s release, Robbie revealed that long before she’d finished reading the script, she accepted the role as it was a highly significant story that needed telling and bringing to new audiences. “I was pretty rattled by the time I got to the end of [the Bombshell] script, to be honest,” Robbie explained to Variety. “And I knew long before I finished the script that I wanted to do it and be a part of it, just because I thought it was important to tell, and be a part of, and support in any way that I can. I hadn’t, for once, thought of the character first. I thought of the content and the messaging before kind of aligning myself with the character. That came next, was starting to understand Kayla.”
Unlike Theron and Kidman, who play the media personalities Megyn Kelly and Gretchen Carlson, Robbie’s character Kayla Pospisil is fictional. Nevertheless, during an appearance on the Ellen DeGeneres Show, the Barbie star piqued fans’ interest when she suggested that Kayla might be based on a mixture of accounts from real women working at Fox. She said: “We used a lot of source material in finding the story and also spoke to a lot of women who were part of the story. Some of them were still working at Fox. Some of them really didn’t want their names out there.”
Despite Kayla not being real per se, the character is conservative, which doesn’t align with Robbie’s personal views. In the same Variety interview, she discussed how she built and connected with her character after initially struggling. Social media helped her understand Kayla’s thought processes. “Understanding her upbringing and her point of view on politics in the world, that really took me a minute,” she said.
Robbie concluded: “Twitter was extremely helpful. I would follow these young, conservative girls who are very vocal with their beliefs and their political points of view. And that was fascinating because they’re my age. In some ways, we’d have a lot in common. And then, in other ways, I was like, ‘We are living on totally different planets.'”
