MARGOT ROBBIE at all times thought that once she turned into an outstanding satisfactory actor, she would write Quentin Tarantino a letter. simply to get on his radar. Or at the least to let him know the way tons his films supposed to her. She was bound individuals need to inform him that the entire time. but still. "I've all the time been a massive—large—Tarantino fan," she tells me one afternoon in los angeles. "i like his motion pictures. Love them." After Robbie watched the primary reduce of I, Tonya, the 2017 biopic about figure skater Tonya Harding, which Robbie produced and starred in, she decided she become eventually good ample. (The performance would earn her an Oscar nomination.) "So I wrote him and observed, 'i am keen on your movies, and that i would like to work with you in some means. Or any capacity.' "
When Tarantino obtained Robbie's letter, he'd these days finished the script for once Upon a Time in Hollywood, a romp during the film industry of the late Sixties, which opens this month. pals who'd read the script had already requested if he'd be casting Robbie in the role of Sharon Tate, the actress, wife of Roman Polanski, and most famous victim of the Manson murders. Then Robbie's letter arrived. The timing become spooky adequate that Tarantino thought they should meet. soon Robbie was sitting on the director's kitchen table, reading the script. Robbie is a careful reader; it took her four hours. Tarantino would now and again pop in to present her food or a Victoria Bitter, an Australian beer. when I later ask Tarantino what made Robbie correct for the role, he tells me, "Margot appears like Sharon Tate. . . . and she or he can carry Sharon's innocence and purity—those features are imperative to the story."
Tarantino's movie is about the conclusion of Hollywood's Golden Age, but Robbie, who is 28, has come to signify so an awful lot of what's new. As an Australian cleaning soap actress, she entered Hollywood being typecast. She performed the bronzed, gold-digging beauty in Martin Scorsese's The Wolf of Wall road, the hot blonde explaining personal loan bonds from a bubble bath in 2015's The massive short, and Jane following Alexander Skarsgård's Tarzan into the Congo. nonetheless it became out Robbie wanted greater than these roles. It became out she desired to placed on a fats suit for I, Tonya and to cowl her face in boils for Mary Queen of Scots and to produce feminine-driven tasks via her construction enterprise, LuckyChap leisure. part of the allure in Robbie's Tarantino story is that it—like the movie itself—sounds very historic Hollywood: An aspiring actress writes a fan letter to an auteur director in hopes of getting forged in one of his nostalgia- loving films. but Hollywood is changing, and whereas Robbie may additionally have arrived at the end of an period, she is now among the women ushering in a new one.
today we're on the set of Birds of Prey, a spin-off of 2016's Suicide Squad that Robbie developed and pitched to Warner Bros. as an R-rated, female-led superhero motion movie—a commercialized made from new Hollywood if ever there become one. "I believe there's a notion that a PG female-led motion film is sort of regarded a chick flick," says Robbie.
At $seventy five million, here is LuckyChap's largest task so far, however Robbie seems unperturbed. "neatly, we're on schedule and on price range, which is a beautiful place to be." In Birds, which is due out next year, Robbie will reprise her function as Harley Quinn, the Joker's ex. but nowadays she's essentially a producer. Wandering the set in jeans and a smiley-face T-shirt with two hearts for eyes, her cellular telephone suspended from a rope in area of a purse, she introduces me to the women who work together with her: Cathy (Yan), the director; Jody, the script supervisor; Sue, a producer. We run into Mary Elizabeth Winstead, who has spent the day performing stunts as Huntress, a crossbow wielding vigilante. Winstead pulls down her music pants to reveal a bruise on her hip. "Shit," Robbie says. "That appears legit."
The day's shoot is at a medieval-trend stone abbey in Highland Park. "Sorry I'm no longer taking you to color mugs or whatever," Robbie says. She's referring to the tropes of celebrity profiles, the skydiving or skateboarding or some thing else actresses are alleged to do to attraction writers. once I say that it is just about inconceivable to locate a narrative during which she's not described as a "bombshell," Robbie suppresses an eye roll. "I hate that observe. I hate it—so a great deal. I feel like a brat announcing that because thereare worse things, but I'm now not a bombshell. I'm now not a person who walks in a room and the checklist stops and americans turn like, 'examine that lady.' That doesn't happen. people who recognize me, in the event that they needed to sum me up in one observe I don't understand what that notice would be, but I'm definite it would now not be bombshell."
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Glamorous movie star isn't really Robbie's vibe. She laughs with no trouble, curses liberally, and is extra more likely to pick out a shared trailer if it means making room in the price range for whatever thing else. right here she is on the outlandish calls for (or so she's heard) of certain actors to have their bathtubs crammed with Evian water: "They ought to have big insecurities they're compensating for." And on the tribulations of life in manhattan, a city she has only sampled in stretches: "Fucking A—shit exhibit!" Sophia Kerr, Robbie's childhood friend and now–company companion, who met her as a braces-wearing, emo metallic–listening pre-tween in Australia, describes Robbie as somebody who "likes a good time," even if it's taking belly-dancing classes in Marrakech, going to see Celine Dion in London, or trudging via mud at Glastonbury. Nicole Kidman, her costar in director Jay Roach's approaching (and nevertheless untitled) Roger Ail es movie, about sexual harassment at Fox information, calls Robbie a "powerhouse." "She's simply obtained mind-blowing ease," Kidman says. "She appears to be unbelievably mature, and she or he's managed to variety of glide with every thing. She doesn't appear to have resistance. She's very powerful in how she procedures her existence and her work." once I ask Kidman, a fellow Aussie, if she sees a difference between her own route in the trade and Robbie's, she says, "I didn't have the option to provide my very own issues or manage my destiny like that. So that is basically distinctive."
loads of actors wish to be producers, but Robbie looks to in fact feel like one. On I, Tonya, it changed into normal for her to skate off the ice to head over locations or to focus on budgets from the make-up chair. When Robbie landed her first American tv gig, on ABC's short-lived Pan Am, she asked the cinematographer so many questions that sooner or later he handed her a copy of The five C's of Cinematography. At home, in her bed room closet, Robbie has written the classical constitution of a screenplay on significant swaths of butcher paper, in order that she can give thoughtful notes while on calls with writers. Roach recalls their first meeting for the Ailes movie, when Robbie nudged him to add layers to her character, a fictional Fox news associate producer. "She simply sort of talked about, 'I'm no longer super at taking part in naive,' " Roach says. "i believed, That's outstanding as a result of a green newbie wouldn't be virtually as unique.
Harley Quinn, Suicide Squad's baby-voiced psycho schoolgirl on roller skates, isn't precisely a mascot for the emancipation of ladies in Hollywood. but when we drop through the dresser trailer so that Robbie can are trying on a costume meant for tomorrow's shoot—a sequined blazer, sports bra, and orange track shorts—I be aware that this Harley appears greater Sporty Spice than male myth. "That's what happens you probably have a female producer, director, writer," says the movie's costume dressmaker, Erin Benach, who previously worked on a celebrity Is Born.
"Yeah, it's really less male gaze–y," Robbie says.
Benach tells me that Robbie "has an uncanny ability to focus on what's going on within the second, and when she should shift, she will be able to so completely shift." She turns to Robbie: "You sort of have a business mind."
"God, i'm hoping so," Robbie says. "Or else this movie goes to fail!
BIRDS is just one of some 50 tasks on LuckyChap's existing slate. There's also Promising young woman, a rape-revenge thriller starring Carey Mulligan, directed through actress Emerald Fennell (quickly to play Camilla Parker Bowles on The Crown); Dollface, a Hulu comedy created by using the 25-year-historical writer Jordan Weiss; and a film adaptation of Ottessa Moshfegh's novel My yr of relaxation and relaxation. even though LuckyChap's overarching mission is promotion initiatives through ladies, Kerr sums up the company ethos thusly: "Margot once spoke of to me, 'whenever we're analyzing issues, in case your immediate reaction isn't Fuck yes, then it's a no.' "
The enterprise has simply moved its places of work to an industrial advanced close downtown L.A. internal there's a red neon signal bearing the business identify, Haim taking part in at a low quantity, and Tom Ackerley, Robbie's husband and LuckyChap cofounder, a bearded, easygoing Brit in a T-shirt and denims, perched at the marble island of a pristine tiled kitchen.
"This kitchen has been dubbed a Nancy Meyers kitchen," Ackerley tells me.
"Oh, it's so a Nancy Meyers kitchen," Robbie says.
Ackerley makes us espresso on the new espresso desktop that Robbie hasn't mastered yet and retreats to his office ("See ya!"). Press isn't Ackerley's thing, Robbie later inform me. "He's usually a really loud and friendly person, however he's in reality behind the cam," she says.
The story of how Robbie and Ackerley acquired collectively is also the story of LuckyChap. all of it begun in 2014, when Robbie changed into in London advertising The Wolf of Wall road and she or he invited Kerr, in addition to Ackerley and Josey McNamara, a few assistant directors she'd simply met on the set of the film Suite Française, to the premiere. They ended up partying until the wee hours in her hotel room. within the morning, Robbie had to capture a flight to the Golden Globes. "i used to be like, 'Ugh, wouldn't or not it's enjoyable if all of us lived together?' " she recalls. Three days later, the foursome signed a hire on a residence in London. That equal year, they situated LuckyChap in their kitchen, and Robbie and Ackerley became a couple. (They married in 2016.)
It's fine working along with your companion, Robbie says. "we can focus on work all the time. and then work feels like enjoyable. And fun stuff can contain work." enjoyable stuff has recently protected a weekend glamping in massive Sur and a Boogie Nights–themed birthday celebration with chums, where Robbie dressed up as curler woman (naturally) and Ackerley turned into the silk robe–wearing drug broker performed by Alfred Molina. "We just get alongside," she says. "I believe it's crazy that not all couples get along."
If Robbie likes a full condo, it's because she grew up in one—as the 2d youngest of 4—on Australia's Gold Coast, a beachy, surfy area along the nation's jap area. ("It's variety of like Miami," she says. "lots of canals and tacky individuals.") Her mother is a physiotherapist. She doesn't love speaking about her father, who left when she was five. "simply because it's tough to in brief point out devoid of it sounding like 'My dad's awful and. . . .' That whole component. but yes, Mum and dad split up." At seventeen, she moved to Melbourne, to work on a soap referred to as Neighbours, adopted by means of quick intervals in la and long island, before settling in London with Ackerley, Kerr, and McNamara. The story behind the identify LuckyChap? whatever to do with Charlie Chaplin. "We have been drunk, and nobody remembers," Robbie says. "So it's type of like a shit tattoo. I have simplest shit tattoos."
when they moved to la, Robbie and Ackerley settled on their own, though at present they've Robbie's older brother residing with them, in addition to her cousin and her cousin's husband. "It's a standard theme, isn't it?" she says. "I hate—hate—being on my own."
I don't ask her about babies. It become Robbie, after all, who made headlines in January through reminding every person that such questions don't seem to be just tired however also sexist. ("I got married, and the primary query in nearly each interview is 'infants? When are you having one?' " she instructed a British weekly.) lately she and Ackerley were speaking about forming a bit commune with Kerr and McNamara, and travelling double plots across the metropolis. "We'll be like a cult!" says Robbie. after they checked out one property, Robbie requested if she may have a slide built connecting her bed room to the pool. "I suppose that simply sums up the grownup that she is," Kerr says. "she will be able to buy a compound on a whim, in order that her close friends might live close her and in order that she will be able to awaken and slide into the pool."
talking OF CULTS, we are actually en route to Musso & Frank's, enormous not just for its status as a Hollywood landmark but additionally as a pivotal setting in once Upon a Time in Hollywood. The film follows a Western tv actor (Leonardo DiCaprio) and his stunt double (Brad Pitt), who reside next door to Sharon Tate (Robbie). There are also takes on Bruce Lee, Steve McQueen, and a wild-eyed Charles Manson. And that's pretty a lot all i can say. The venture became shrouded in so tons secrecy that even after signing an ironclad NDA, i was allowed to watch simplest a element. on the whole, the movie simply looks like a very fun celebration that you just understand is ready to come to a awful conclusion.
Robbie's Tate (like her Tonya Harding) is much less imitation than an interpretation. Whereas Tate has always gave the impression ethereal and elusive, like someone in an old graphic, Robbie's efficiency is exuberant and in full color, like a healthy that's simply been lit. Her prep for roles is often physical. moreover Robbie's standard Pilates routine, her stunt practising finally ends up being her default exercise. For Tonya, she discovered to ice-skate. For Harley, it was roller-skating and fight-practicing. becoming Tate become extra advanced, with Robbie working with a move coach doing whatever known as "animal work" to achieve Tate's lightness and brightness; in one scene, she levitates midair. "It turned into such an odd challenge," Robbie says. "I locate it an awful lot more convenient to go darkish and irritated. With Tonya, i needed to head in reality heavy, just about like she had weights on her toes. This time i was making an attempt to do the reverse."
We're backyard the restaurant now, and the air smells of grilled steak, which Robbie inhales like a scented candle. "I'm such a carnivore," she says. "I'm making an attempt so difficult to do meatless Mondays, for, like, environment reasons, however fuck, it's tough." today is Thursday, so we order two filets and get returned to the business of working with Tarantino. We haven't noted it yet, but as soon as Upon a Time is the first of Tarantino's films now not produced by Harvey Weinstein. it's additionally the director's first release in view that the #MeToo move and considering . . . right here Robbie finishes my thought: "The Uma Thurman aspect?"
Early closing yr, Thurman advised The manhattan times that she, too, had been assaulted with the aid of Weinstein, and that her relationship with Tarantino had suffered subsequently. She held Weinstein's studio, Miramax, liable for accidents she sustained in a vehicle crash on the set of 2003's Kill bill, and for suppressing photos of the accident that she ultimately released herself. according to Thurman, she'd asked Tarantino for a stunt double to force the vehicle, but Tarantino insisted that Thurman do it. And there have been further details of the director's quest for authenticity on that movie—spitting on Thurman in one scene, choking her with a series in one more.
Tarantino has by no means been accused of sexual misconduct or harassment. He called the motor vehicle crash "one of the most largest regrets of my lifestyles." Robbie tells me she became reassured via this and through the indisputable fact that Tarantino had helped make the photos public. "but the notion basically crossed my intellect," Robbie says, "like, Will individuals view this choice as conflicting with what I'm doing on the manufacturing facet?
"I don't comprehend," she continues. "I don't comprehend how to say what I feel about it, as a result of I'm so grateful to be equipped of power and to have extra inventive manage when this is embraced and inspired now. on the identical time, I grew up adoring films that had been the influence of the previous version of Hollywood, and aspiring to be part of it, in an effort to have these dreams come real additionally feels particularly pleasurable. I don't recognize. perhaps I'm having my cake and consuming it too. . . ."
Robbie is answering this query because I requested, and it shouldn't actually fall to actresses to right the wrongs of Hollywood. The fact is that old vigor structures haven't long gone away, whilst new ones are nonetheless rising. "it will be more convenient, and so an awful lot extra unfulfilling, no longer to have a construction enterprise," Robbie says. "To no longer employ first- and second-time female directors, and stake millions of different people's money, and put my name to it and every little thing I've worked for, however I've made the option to do it, and that i don't regret it. On the flip side—and it doesn't even think like a flip facet—it turned into my lifelong dream [to work with Tarantino], and that i received to do it, and it makes me unhappy if people might hold that towards me regardless of everything else I'm doing."
It's tricky to parse out all of the layers right here. Tarantino's movie (with the intention to best at Cannes a couple of weeks after Robbie and that i talk) is set a power shift in Hollywood's background, one that ended the studio system and at last created the space for indie masterpieces like Pulp Fiction. It also serves as a reminder of the best of what Hollywood can still do— collect primary film stars for a movie by a director with a novel imaginative and prescient, who can shut down Hollywood Boulevard within the middle of a weekday if he wants to. "Quentin instructed me, 'you will by no means have more enjoyable on a movie set.' And he became correct. I had the premier event of my existence," Robbie says. "There are some facets of ancient Hollywood which are definitely brilliant and important and should be carried over. Do you erase heritage because there have been some dangerous constituents? might be it's vital for us at this juncture to well known the respectable elements as neatly."
It isn't 9:00 p.m. yet, however Robbie has to hurry domestic to monitor dailies from a few LuckyChap tasks at present in construction. The next morning she'll be on set at 4:30 a.m. to perform stunts as Harley, and at the workplace via 5:00 p.m., for what she calls a "half-day." though she spends her workdays gazing films by means of female directors and reading scripts with the aid of female writers, when she goes home at nighttime, Robbie tells me, she nonetheless likes to monitor films like Snatch and Braveheart. "My love and fervour for feminine filmmakers doesn't imply I all at once don't like male-pushed films," she says. "And that's a vital argument to make—in order that men go see films about women, via ladies. If it's a fine movie, they'll be able to relate."
Correction: An past version of this story referenced the Gold Coast as being determined on Australia's western aspect. it is, definitely, located on the east coast of the nation.
Margot Robbie's attractiveness movements Is Psychotically excellent:
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