The accent that gave Margot Robbie her big break
Margot Robbie is no stranger to an on-screen accent. After kicking off her career with a role in the beloved Aussie sitcom Neighbours, which allowed her to act in her own voice for several years, she began taking on feature films in the States and the United Kingdom, which put her accent skills to the test. Since then, she’s taken on Brooklynites and Brits in equal measure, refining her pronunciation with each new role.
Robbie’s first brush with a British accent came in 2013 with About Time, a time-travelling Richard Curtis rom-com starring Domhnall Gleeson and Rachel Adams. Her pronunciation wasn’t quite perfect, but it kicked off a career full of practice. It’s now rare to hear Robbie acting in her own accent, particularly as she continues to take on more and more big-budget Hollywood roles.
In the same year that Robbie starred in About Time, she tackled one of her first huge Hollywood projects as Naomi Lapaglia in The Wolf of Wall Street. The role required her to adopt a Brooklyn accent, which she quickly found favour with. While speaking with Variety about her previous roles, the Barbie star shared her love for the accent, noting its similarity to her natural, Aussie intonation.
“I find a Brooklyn accent far easier to do than other American regions,” she explained, “because dropping the R is something we do in Australian as well.” The ease she feels with the accent certainly comes across in her iconic performance as the Duchess of Bay Ridge, Naomi, in The Wolf of Wall Street.
With only a couple of features to her name, taking on the character of Naomi was a daunting task for several reasons. Robbie struggled with some of the details of the character, who had been dubbed the “sexiest blonde ever” in the script and was based on a real person, Belfort’s former wife, which comes with its own pressures. Beyond this, Robbie also worked with some of the biggest names in the business, namely Leonardo DiCaprio and Martin Scorsese, very early into her Hollywood career. The stakes were high.
Still, Robbie refused to buckle under the pressure of the boys club that surrounded her. Her pronunciation is consistent throughout the three-hour runtime, coming across as authentic and lived-in. Each time she shouts in the face of Leonardo Dicaprio’s Jordan Belfort or uses her sexuality to manipulate the men around her, her accent is unwavering. Her immediate comfort with the accent clearly allowed her to flourish despite the pressures that came with the character and the project.
It makes sense, then, that Robbie has continued to favour this accent in her acting career. After starring in The Wolf of Wall Street, she honed her New York accent even further through her depictions of the pigtail-wearing, baseball-bat-wielding Harley Quinn. Though the Suicide Squad films weren’t particularly well-received, Robbie’s performance remains a highlight, which is partly down to her mastery of the accent. She truly understood and embodied the character of Harley, as well as her style of speaking.
In fact, Robbie has become so comfortable with the Brooklynite style of speaking that she now struggles to adopt other accents. When she took on the role of Oregon-born Olympian Tonya Harding in 2017, she found it particularly difficult to perfect her pronunciation. “Hitting a really hard R is hard work for my mouth,” she explained, though her performance won her an Academy Award nomination nonetheless.
Robbie’s preference for the Brooklyn speech style hasn’t stopped her from trying her hand at other accents, though. Her starring role in Greta Gerwig’s Barbie last year required a far less distinctive American accent as she looked to embody the so-called stereotypical Barbie. It’s almost impossible to find her Aussie accent bleeding into the performance, showing that her talent extends beyond the boundaries of Brooklyn.
Although Robbie certainly seems more at home when speaking in a Brooklyn accent, almost more so than when she speaks in her natural Aussie accent, she is quickly becoming a vocal chameleon behind the camera. With each new project, she adds to filmography, glimpses of her real accent are becoming less and less frequent.
