The role Margot Robbie wasn’t allowed to play until she was famous: “I didn’t have enough international value”
In 2013’s The Wolf of Wall Street, Margot Robbie played the highly sexualised romantic interest of Jordan Belfort, in what is perhaps the 21st century’s most celebrated portrayal of debauchery, and as brilliant as she was in the film, a very dangerous fate awaited her.
As armies of misinformed men queued up for the film, mistaking its warning signs as a guidebook to life, Robbie was quickly becoming a sex symbol upon which that toxicity was projected. And at only 23 years, she was at a career crossroads: one road would see her lean into that portrayal, and cash in on it with films to come, the other would be to reject it and use her profile to evolve into a character actor.
Immediately, she was presented with a project that would give her the opportunity to follow the path she most wanted, establishing herself as an artist. The script for the apocalyptic science fiction film Z for Zachariah found its way onto Robbie’s desk, where the role of Ann would provide her a spot alongside Chris Pine and Chiwetel Ejiofor. Ordinarily, it would have been the perfect film to land her the sort of role she bagged in 2013 with Scorsese, but she soon learned how warped the movie business was, because, had she not had a box office smash to her name, she might not have been able to pivot into arthouse.
“I was actually trying to get the role of Ann in Z for Zachariah before I had done Wolf,” she explained, “but because I hadn’t done a large film, I didn’t have enough international value to my name to get the film funded. So another actress was attached who had been in more, bigger-budget commercial films. Ironically, you have to do the bigger films in order to make a small film. When I first tried to do Z for Zachariah, I couldn’t attach enough value to my name.”
It was a passion project for the actor and one she finally bagged, but having been turned down for not being a big enough star, she then almost missed out on it again because of the schedule that becoming a big star imposed on her.
She explained how she wanted from the moment she read the script, which was a year and a half before she even attached her name to it, but the part was offered to Amanda Seyfried instead. Regardless, the tides turned, and, as Robbie highlighted, “The opportunity came up at the last minute, when I was literally just coming off Wolf, and I realised that I was going to be typecast really quickly, and I was like, ‘I don’t want to keep playing the same role that I was playing in Wolf.’ So when this came up again, I was like, ‘I’d kill to do that’. And what better time to do the complete opposite of what I’ve just been doing?”
It was perhaps a project that lent more gravitas to her career than the preceding The Wolf of Wall Street, because soon after, she turned in an Oscar-nominated performance in I, Tonya, and a shapeshifting output for Mary Queen of Scots, which ultimately pushed back at any typecasting that may have occurred in the wake of her 2013 Scorsese vehicle.
