“Intrigued to find out”: Margot Robbie’s acting ritual and the time it entered the spirit realm
For many of us, having a form of lucky charm on us when we need some reassurance, or a specific ritual to get us into the zone, can really do wonders. For Margot Robbie, it’s perfume, choosing a different one for each character she plays.
You can’t underestimate the power of scent, which can carry you to places that you thought you’d long forgotten. Writer Adelle Stripe even penned a whole book about her memories of adolescence defined by perfume, entitled Base Notes, with each chapter named after a different bottled fragrance that she doused herself in as a teen.
She’s not alone in this, either, for I used to collect perfumes as a child, displaying the bottles on my shelves with as much admiration for their shapes and colours as for the smells inside of them. The scent of one of the Gwen Stefani Harajuku Lovers perfumes still lingers in my mind 15 years later, as does the memory of its doll-like casing, and I can still remember the smell of the first-ever body spray I bought, too, its sweet scent and hot pink lid wrapped up in memories of dance performances and sleepovers.
Scent has this unique ability to transport, so it’s no surprise that Robbie uses it as her trick to get into the mindset of someone else. For a strong and intense character, perhaps she uses a punchy fragrance, and for a more gentle one, something fresher, more innocent, with the actor revealing to Deadline, “Every character I play, I pick a perfume. It just helps me associate a smell with my character, and then I never wear the perfume again.”
When it came to shooting Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon A Time in Hollywood…, however, her experience of picking out a perfume was totally different. She was cast as Sharon Tate, the Hollywood star who was tragically murdered by the Manson family in 1969 while pregnant with her first child, but in Tarantino’s reimagining, her fate is different, and she walks out alive.
Robbie wanted to portray Tate sensitively, and she spent much time with the late actor’s sister, Debra, to hone an honest depiction of the star. One day, she asked her, “Debra, I know that this is a kinda random question, but did Sharon have a particular perfume she liked to wear?”, as she was “intrigued to find out Sharon’s favoured perfume”.
Miraculously, Robbie was given a bottle of Tate’s actual perfume that she had really used, and the actor couldn’t quite believe it, but then, Debra’s response to Robbie’s question was, “Yes, yes, she did. I was going to give it to you. Sharon wanted me to give it to you”.
Tate’s sister believed that she had been contacted through the spirit realm, so to speak, and granted the permission to allow Robbie a chance to use the perfume, to smell it and get a greater understanding of who she really was. The name of the perfume that Debra (and by proxy, Sharon) allowed Robbie to use has never been revealed, although it has previously been said that the actor was a fan of fragrances like the Eau de Cologne version of Chanel No 5 and Guerlain’s Jicky parfum.
Debra loved Robbie’s portrayal of her sister, and it seems like she knew, from the beginning, that her performance wasn’t going to be like the terrible, exploitative ones that had come before. Allowed to use the Valley of the Dolls star’s own fragrance, Robbie brought an elegant and respectful vision of the actor to the screen, as though she’d been possessed by Tate herself.
