The stroke of luck that launched Margot Robbie’s career: “I didn’t have an actor”
As one of the faces of this era of Hollywood, Margot Robbie is polarising, headline-grabbing, and one of the biggest stars on the planet right now, such that if you asked a computer to design a beautiful film actress from scratch, the results would look like her.
Through a combination of onscreen prowess and savvy behind-the-scenes business, she’s quickly become one of the most important people in the movie industry in her mid-30s, and it’s been a wild ride, but one that looked highly unlikely at the start.
She was born in the town of Dalby, Queensland, a place with a population that could fit into the Oldham Athletic football stadium and still have room leftover. These humble beginnings and the relative size of the Australian film industry in general stacked the odds against her ever becoming a professional actor at all, let alone the superstar she was destined to be; however, she kept plugging away, never losing hope, and one day, her luck changed for the better.
Aash Aaron is an Australian filmmaker and acting coach, as well as the first name in every phonebook ever, who, in the late noughties, was working on the psychological thriller ICU, about a group of teenagers who accidentally catch a sadistic serial killer in the act. He had chosen three of his students to star in the film, but his female lead had to drop out when she fell behind with schoolwork.
“I was ready to go, and I didn’t have an actor,” Aaron explained to News.com.au, “I talked to all the girls, but I didn’t even need to see them act. I’m an acting teacher, and I just said to [Margot], ‘If you are prepared to do exactly what I tell you to do, and allow me to train you for six months, you can have the lead role in this movie’. And of course, she said yes. She just didn’t believe it was ever possible.”
Aaron would go on to direct Robbie in another low-budget feature called Vigilante, which ended up releasing before ICU, and these were her first experiences on a film set. Sure, it was hardly the MGM lot, but it was experience nonetheless, and with these two appearances under belt, Robbie was ready to go for something bigger.
In 2008, the same year that Vigilante was released, she landed the role of Donna Freedman on the soap opera Neighbours, which was initially written as a guest character, but her star power was so undeniable that she ended up staying on the show for three years.
Needless to say that her movie career took a significant upturn in the years following ICU and Vigilante, with her first major film role being in Richard Curtis’ god-awful About Time, which premiered in 2013. That very same year, she appeared as Naomi Lapaglia in Martin Scorsese’s The Wolf of Wall Street, giving, shall we say, an unforgettable performance, and the rest, as they say, is history.
Everybody has to start somewhere, and the road to success is often paved with lucky breaks, such that when Margot Robbie stepped in for that poor, stressed-out student all those years ago, she couldn’t have possibly known that it would lead her all the way to the very top.
