By David Raether
Oh, I know. This blog title is a bit of a bold statement, but please, prove me wrong. Name me a Millennial actress who has more richly shaped characters than Margot Robbie. Find me an actress who is more fearless in her exploration of her roles. Cite one who consistently appears in more varied films and roles. Margot Robbie can do just about anything as an actress. (Okay, I haven’t seen her in a musical, but whatever.) She’s the Meryl Streep of the Millennial Generation. While she may have been in some mediocre movies, she is never herself mediocre, always finding something interesting to play. When she’s on the screen, she is all you want to watch.
And she’s come from about as far away from Hollywood as a person can come.
Robbie was raised—along with two sisters and a brother—by a single mother in a house on her grandparents’ farm in a remote and beautifully rugged part of Australia known as the Gold Coast hinterland. You know you’re from far away if you’re from a place that has “hinterland” as part of the name.
Many actors don’t start thinking about acting as a career until they are in college—or even after. Kevin Costner, for instance, was majoring in marketing and finance at Cal State Fullerton in Southern California and didn’t get interested in acting and dancing until his senior year there. He started taking acting classes after he finished college but wasn’t fully serious about it until he met and talked to Richard Burton by chance on a flight home from Florida after his honeymoon.
Not Robbie. She was a natural performer as a little girl, always staging little plays starring herself for her family while growing up on the farm. “There was always a show in my house,” she said of her childhood. “I was obsessed with movies, with anything on TV, and whatever I saw, I would re-enact it for my mum who had enough on her plate running a house, looking after four kids, and I'd be pulling at her leg, 'Mum... mum watch my new show.' I'd even make my family pay to watch my shows.”
Her mother enrolled her in a circus school when she was eight, and she was particularly good at the trapeze. She performed in theater in high school and studied acting on the side, all the while holding down jobs as a bartender, a house cleaner, and a Subway sandwich maker. She appeared in a couple of low-budget independent films in high school and said being on a movie set for the first time was “like a dream come true.”
After high school, with the thinnest of resumes, she made the nearly 18-hour drive and moved to Melbourne, Australia, a world away from the childhood farm.
In 2008, she joined the cast of the popular Australian soap opera Neighbors, where she spent the next three years until moving to the U.S. In 2011, she landed a role on the ABC drama Pan Am (2011). That show lasted only a year, but her performance as a newly-minted flight attendant in the 1960s drew a lot of attention. She made her feature film debut in About Time (2013), and then later that year was cast as Brooklyn wife of Jordan Belfort in Martin Scorsese’s The Wolf of Wall Street (2013).
The film turned out to be Scorsese’s biggest box office success to date, and her performance was compared to another blonde bombshell: Cathy Moriarty in Scorsese’s landmark film, Raging Bull (1980).
Robbie was then off to the races with her career. During the ensuing eight years, she appeared in an astonishing 20 films. Part of what’s incredible about this output is how consistently excellent her performances have been. She is flat-out superb in just about every one of these movies—and not all of them have been masterpieces by any stretch of imagination. Despite this, Robbie has only received two Academy Awards nominations, along with several others from BAFTA and the Golden Globes. She is yet to secure a major award at this point, which is a travesty in my book.
One of my favorite aspects of Margot Robbie is that she is an ice hockey fan. After moving to New York from Melbourne, she became an avid fan of the NHL’s New York Rangers and decided to take up the sport. She’d never skated before in her life, but that didn’t stop her. She even joined an amateur league team, playing right wing. I would just like to point out here that I grew up playing hockey, and my preferred position was right wing. So should she ever want to discuss the joys of playing hockey with someone, I’ll raise my hand here right now. It is, without question, the most fun sport there is to play. Especially on a bitterly cold winter night in Minneapolis.
Robbie married British director Tom Ackerley in 2016, and they currently live in Los Angeles. She keeps her personal life to herself, which I also find admirable.
Obviously, I am an enormous admirer of her work. I could pick any one of her movies to discuss in this entry, but for arbitrary reasons, here are five Margot Robbie films I think you definitely need to add to your queue.
This isn’t a bad movie in the slightest, but it’s just not a great one. With this film, Martin Scorsese gives Wall Street the gangster film treatment it has long deserved. The problem is that it doesn’t quite work—but through no fault of Robbie. The main character, Jordan Belfort, is just not that interesting of a person. Yes, he was brazen and outrageous, but ultimately he’s just kinda cheesy. Leonardo DiCaprio works hard to find something fascinating in Belfort’s character... but comes up relatively empty.
On the other hand, Robbie is just fabulous as Belfort’s second wife, Norma LaPaglia, of Bay Ridge in Brooklyn. Adopting a near-perfect Brooklyn accent, Robbie plays Norma to the hilt. The scene where they first go out to a fancy dinner is just magical, right down to Norma asking the waiter for a straw for her glass of red wine. And for a pure dose of sexual power, it’s going to be hard to ever top the “Mommy is very mad at Daddy” scene. Yowza!
(P.S. — If you’re looking for a truly excellent film about Wall Street corruption, check out The Wizard of Lies, the 2017 HBO movie starring Robert De Niro as Bernie Madoff.)
Talk about a powerhouse performance! Robbie plays notorious figure skating superstar Tonya Harding, a young woman from the wrong side of the tracks who became one of the sport’s leading figures—all the while fighting (often quite literally) her way through physical and psychological abuse from her sleazy husband and horrible mother. I admire her performance here so much; I think its only equivalent in modern American film is Meryl Streep’s performance in Sophie’s Choice (1982). What’s required of Robbie in this film is an incredible combination of anger, victimhood, gutsiness, style, trashiness and joy. It’s a remarkable performance and I can’t think of another actress who could have pulled it off as well as Robbie does here.
When the events in this film originally unfolded nearly 30 years ago, I remember thinking I couldn’t have been any less interested. It just seemed like an overly melodramatic foofaraw in a quasi sport I didn’t care about. I was so wrong. This is a gripping drama. While Robbie did not win an Academy Award for her performance, Allison Janney won a Best Supporting Actress for her performance as Tonya Harding’s awful mother, LaVondra Golden. And if you’re wondering if Janney’s hairstyle is accurate, check out interviews with Golden from that time period. There she is, with a haircut seemingly copied from Moe of The Three Stooges.
The skating sequences are a combination of Robbie, a stunt double professional skater, and CGI done by the firm Eight VFX. Robbie trained five days a week for five months to prepare for the skating scenes in the film, even herniating a disc in her neck at one point. The movie was directed by Craig Gillespie, written by Steven Rogers, and produced by Robbie and her husband, Tom Ackerley. Robbie’s brief, wordless scene in front of a mirror doing her makeup prior to performing in the 1994 Lillehammer Winter Olympics should be required viewing for all actors.
This film tells the story of the rivalry between two of the most powerful women in history: Mary Queen of Scots (Saoirse Ronan) and Elizabeth I of England, portrayed by Robbie. Directed by acclaimed British theater director Josie Rourke, this movie was not entirely successful, as it has been widely criticized for its historical inaccuracies. For instance, Mary Stuart is portrayed as having a Scottish accent, except she spent nearly her entire life living in France.
Normally, nitpicking historical inaccuracies in a film is sort of beside the point. The point should be, “Does the film work as a film?” Here, the film sort of works as a film, but almost entirely because of the two leads. Things just don’t quite come together as a compelling story, however, and the nitpicks you’ve read about start to get on your nerves towards the end. The critic for The Telegraph called the movie “history porn for the Instagram generation.” This actually makes me think you might want to have your eighth-grader who thinks history is boring try this movie.
Robbie’s Queen Elizabeth is a steely and imperious character, not to be trifled with. She plays Queen Elizabeth as a ruthless and unrelenting figure, calculating and cold in ways I don’t we’ve ever seen before. Her performance certainly matches stride for stride with Bette Davis’s performance in the same role in The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex (1939). Ronan’s Mary Stuart is warmer and more emotional. Both of these elements play exactly right; the film is worth watching for their performances alone.
This is a searing and painful portrait of the sexual harassment culture at Fox News under its founder, Roger Ailes (John Lithgow). Charlize Theron plays Megyn Kelly, Nicole Kidman plays Gretchen Carlson, and Robbie plays Kayla Pospisil, an assistant on the Bill O'Reilly show. Theron and Kidman are playing women we already know from their on-screen appearances on Fox, but Robbie’s character is a lowly assistant who is sexually harassed by Ailes and is in a far weaker position.
There is a moment in this film that just makes you feel sick. Pospisil has been called into Ailes’ office during her second day on the job, where she excitedly tells Ailes about her goals in television. He just sits there like Jabba the Hutt, then asks her to stand up and turn around. After she does that, he asks her to pull up her skirt a bit. Robbie’s reaction is pure acting brilliance. She realizes she is trapped in the office with one of the most powerful men in television and she has to do what he says. The look of muted anguish and terror held back by an uncomfortable smile…it paints a clear picture of what it’s like to be in such a position. This is an infuriating and illuminating film, and Robbie manages to turn in the best performance out of the three stars. Highly recommended.
I’m always saying to myself, “I don’t care for Quentin Tarantino movies, so I’ll pass.” And then I watch one, and then say to myself, “Okay, well, fine, this was great, but I don’t like the rest of them.” This has been going on for years now. I was thinking that same thing before I watched this film, and then I was utterly beguiled by it. It’s an absolute delight; a ‘what-if’ dreamscape in which Bruce Lee gets beat up and the Manson family gets what’s coming to them in 1969 Hollywood. Brad Pitt turns in one of the best performances of his career here as a stunt man/avenging angel.
Meanwhile, Leonardo DiCapriois a bloated TV star who employs Pitt’s character as a handyman. The house next door is where Roman Polanski lives with his very pregnant girlfriend, actress Sharon Tate, played by Robbie. She’s only in a few scenes, but she brings to life a murder victim who was killed before she became a true celebrity. We don’t really know anything about Sharon Tate, other than she was beautiful. Robbie makes her achingly real. She’s a happy person, eagerly awaiting the birth of her first child in only a week or two. The short scene where she goes to a movie theater to buy a ticket to see a movie she is in and tells the clerk she is in the movie just breaks your heart. Robbie plays it with such a naive excitement, you can’t help but think what awaited her. As I say, a heartbreaking performance in a small role, but one that makes the movie even more poignant. The trick pulled off here is that Tarantino gives this story a happy (and very violent) ending. I will say, after seeing Robbie’s Sharon Tate, your knowledge of what really happened makes you sadder than you thought possible about a crime from more than half a century ago.
David Raether is a veteran TV writer and essayist. He worked for 12 years as a television sitcom writer/producer, including a 111-episode run on the ground-breaking ABC comedy “Roseanne.” His essays have been published by Salon.com, The Times of London, and Longforms.org, and have been lauded by The Atlantic Magazine and the BBC World Service. His memoir, Homeless: A Picaresque Memoir from Our Times, is awaiting publication.