“I hate it so much”: the one thing Margot Robbie doesn’t want to be known for
Margot Robbie can seemingly do anything. The Barbie star began her career as a cast member of the soap opera Neighbours in her native Australia before making the leap to Hollywood. Her breakout role was in Martin Scorsese’s 2013 crime drama The Wolf of Wall Street, playing Leonardo DiCaprio’s fiery trophy wife, but instead of languishing in glamourously vapid roles, she has made strident steps in a totally different direction.
With her blindingly glamorous movie star looks, Robbie is the epitome of the Hollywood bombshell, but she quickly went out of her way to avoid being typecast. Following The Wolf of Wall Street, she played several roles that allowed her to flex her dramatic muscles and play with her relentlessly photogenic appearance. In I, Tonya, she played disgraced figure skater Tonya Harding. In Mary Queen of Scots, she played Queen Elizabeth I, dialling back her megawatt charisma as much as possible and playing the monarch as a dour, insecure woman in contrast with Saoirse Ronan’s Queen of Scots.
Robbie’s most savvy step in freeing herself from the gilded cage of the Hollywood Blonde was to form her own production company, LuckyChap Entertainment. Many stars have done the same, but Robbie has proven to be remarkably adept at choosing projects to finance. The movies she produces aren’t just vanity projects and she isn’t just phoning it in.
In a Vogue story from 2019, several filmmakers who had worked with the star early in her career noted how she had been involved on nearly every level even without a producing credit. When producing and starring in I, Tonya, she would swap between discussing the budget, acting in a scene, and scouting locations.
Her track record speaks for itself. I, Tonya, Promising Young Woman, Saltburn, Barbie, and the 2024 indie darling My Old Ass are just some of the projects her company has backed over the years, and it has a hefty slate of new ones in the pipeline. This status as a powerhouse producer has turned Robbie from an Oscar-nominated movie star to a bonafide Hollywood mogul with a ‘Best Picture’ Oscar nomination under her belt.
It’s no surprise, then, that the multi-hyphenate filmmaker doesn’t want to be associated with only her looks. In the Vogue interview, Robbie said she is desperate for people to stop referring to her as a bombshell.
“I hate that word. I hate it—so much,” she said. “I feel like a brat saying that because there are worse things, but I’m not a bombshell. I’m not someone who walks in a room and the record stops and people turn like, ‘Look at that woman.’ That doesn’t happen. People who know me, if they had to sum me up in one word I don’t know what that word would be, but I’m certain it would not be bombshell.”
While anyone who’s been in a room with Robbie might disagree about the metaphorical record scratch, she has more than earned the right to be described in other terms. The fact that she doesn’t want to be known as a bombshell, however, doesn’t mean that she’s shied away from making savvy choices about her image. As the titular star of Barbie, she leveraged her bombshell beauty to subvert expectations, showing that a seemingly perfect life and a perfect appearance do not equal fulfilment.
