Margot Robbie thinks she’s the right actor in the wrong time: “I would have done better then”
Long before Margot Robbie was sticking her fingers in Jacob Elordi’s mouth or figuring out what it means to be a human as a Barbie doll, she was appearing on Australian television as a soap star, her role in Neighbours seeing her appear across a whopping 355 episodes.
But Robbie clearly always knew she was meant for Hollywood, and after relocating to America, she landed herself a role in Martin Scorsese’s The Wolf of Wall Street when she was just 22, from which moment, there was no doubt that she wouldn’t become a star.
Through the years, she has racked up Oscar nominations, started her own production company, LuckyChap Entertainment, appeared in major blockbusters like Suicide Squad and Barbie, and even, for a time, become the highest-paid female actor in the world. Robbie’s achievements seem unending, with her star power constantly allowing her to land the kinds of roles she’s not even suited for (“Wuthering Heights” being the ultimate proof).
Yet, take a closer look at her filmography, and you’ll find that more often than not, her films have fared terribly at the box office. She’s a great actor, and of course, this can’t be said for Barbie, which grossed over $1billion upon its release in 2023, but look at Terminal, Slaughterhouse Rulez, Amsterdam, Babylon, and A Big, Bold Beautiful Journey, to name just a few mega-flops.
It often seems like her career choices undersell her potential, and she winds up in movies that emphasise her position as ‘super star Margot Robbie’, when really, she needs to be given the chance to appear in something more lowkey that would actually give her the chance to break away from her Hollywood shackles. Get her in a Lars von Trier film or something.
Robbie actually thinks that she would be better suited to a career during a different era of cinema, something she came to learn about herself when she starred as Nellie in Damien Chazelle’s Babylon, playing an actor during the transition from silent to sound filmmaking.
Before the dawn of sound cinema, actors had to rely on their bodies and their faces to convey emotion more than anything else, and Robbie thinks that this would have suited her pretty well.
“I think I would have done better with that medium then,” she told the San Francisco Chronicle, “I just really, really enjoyed focusing on the physicality of this character. I love body acting. I love thinking of my entire body as an instrument. And you know, in that time, without being able to use dialogue, that is going to be even more at the forefront of your performance. I would have loved that. It’s kind of like a dance. I guess it’s the frustrated dancer deep inside me.”
Robbie also admitted that being in silent films would mean she “wouldn’t have to worry about accents all the time,” something that certainly feels relevant with her recent turn as Yorkshire lass Cathy in “Wuthering Heights”, in which the richness of a West Riding twang is nowhere to be found.
