The “unbelievably difficult” acting you should never criticise in front of Margot Robbie: “It irritates me so much”
In Australia, where everything is upside down, and all the animals have the ability to kill you in some ghastly fashion, there are certain rules that are non-negotiable.
You have to be able to surf from a very early age, for one. Secondly, you have to drive around in one of those dusty flatbed trucks wearing a hat with corks on it and maybe a vest. Thirdly, you have to eat all your food from a barbecue even if it’s snowing. And fourthly, if that’s a word, if you’re an actor, like Margot Robbie, then at some point you have to appear on either Neighbours or Home and Away.
For some reason, those two soaps were basically the only way in to doing acting as a profession throughout the 1980s and 1990s if you hailed from down under, but if you were lucky enough, or good enough, or quite often attractive enough, then the twin breeding grounds of Ramsay Street and Summer Bay were actually very efficient places to begin if you had one eye on Hollywood.
The roll call of major stars who took that route is genuinely impressive. There’s Memento’s lead Guy Pearce, who went from Mike in Neighbours to an Academy Award nominee working under Christopher Nolan. Russell Crowe is another Ramsay Street alumnus, now an Oscar winner whose movies have grossed over $5bn. Chris Hemsworth was in Home and Away, and now he’s a literal superhero and worth more money than God. If God used money.
Robbie is another one of course, having travelled from Ramsay Street to Hollywood via a stint in Clapham, and she’s undoubtedly one of the industry’s foremost talents now; a revelation in her breakthrough movie under Martin Scorsese in 2013’s The Wolf of Wall Street, a world-conqueror in Greta Gerwig’s blockbuster Barbie and a baseball bat-wielding menace in Suicide Squad.
But she doesn’t take the education her soap background gave her lightly, once telling GQ: ”I learnt a lot on Neighbours. It irritates me so much the way people talk about soaps because it is far more difficult working on a soap than it is on a big studio film.”
Robbie actually spent three years on Neighbours as Donna Freedman, making over 300 episodes and returning for a guest spot in 2022. She added: “On a feature film, you’re very aware that there is a lot of money invested in you and what you look like and how you’re perceived, and it’s daunting, but on a soap, there’s so much pressure to be technically perfect. It’s unbelievably difficult and you have to be incredibly skilled to do that job and people don’t really acknowledge that enough.”
After a slightly lukewarm reaction to her big movie of this year, Emerald Fennell’s Wuthering Heights with Jacob Elordi, Robbie will be hoping to make more of an impact with a lead role in the latest Ocean’s 11 movie, set to be directed by Bradley Cooper and acting as a prequel to the first films that starred the likes of Matt Damon and Brad Pitt.
Robbie confirmed that the movie will tell the story of Danny Ocean’s parents as they prepare a daring heist at the 1962 Monaco Grand Prix. It’s due out in cinemas in June 2027 and stands apart from the Ocean’s 14 reboot of the original series, being put together by George Clooney.
