Margot Robbie is not like other film stars. She clearly has movie-star looks – so much so that when, in Barbie, she bemoans, 'I'm not pretty any more. I'm not 'stereotypical Barbie' pretty,' Helen Mirren's voiceover cuts in to chide: 'Note to the filmmakers: Margot Robbie is the wrong person to cast if you want to make this point.'
But there aren't many red-carpet stars who are profiled in The Wall Street Journal as frequently as in Vogue. There are fewer still who can boast three Oscar nominations for producer on top of two for actress.
And there's only one who describes the best days of her life as living in a student-style flat in South London's Clapham, frequenting sticky-floored nightclub Infernos – described on Tripadvisor as 'the ultimate cheesefest'.
She will be suitably dressed when she arrives tonight at the Oscars, where Barbie is nominated for eight awards (although Greta Gerwig and Robbie missed out in the Best Director and Actress categories respectively – more on this later). And while I don't recall what she was wearing when I interviewed her back in 2013, it was casual enough that it felt like I was chatting to a mate.
Cheerful and down to earth, Robbie gave the impression that acting was funding her backpacking. She was keener to discuss her adventures in Croatia – cave diving, swimming at dawn, hanging out in hostels– than her latest release.
She was, however, very excited about a Scorsese film she'd finished with Leonardo DiCaprio playing a Wall Street banker.
It sounded like another small, object-of-desire role. I thought: ex-Neighbours actress who'd lucked out with a Richard Curtis film (About Time, in which she played a blink-and-you'll-miss-her love interest). I was sort of thinking she was the new Holly Valance. Not exactly a cover story, and in fact it was never even published.
I could not have got her more wrong. Five years later, when she was nominated for Best Actress in I, Tonya, I realised just how wrong. 'Right now, she is probably the biggest star in Hollywood,' says film critic and presenter Ian Nathan.
'Most films need a handful of names to sell the picture. She's as close as you can get to being the one name that can open a film by herself, and she's smart enough to know how to make that work.'
That's her great skill. She is said to have earned $12.5 million from Barbie as an actor (on a par with co-star Ryan Gosling). But, as reported last August in Variety, being the co-producer behind the summer's biggest hit she 'stands to make roughly $50 million in salary and box-office bonuses'. It's fair to say that she's a billion-dollar producer – only 53 films have ever made $1 billion or above.
Her screen career began playing Donna Freedman on the Australian soap Neighbours. It was supposed to be a guest slot – she stayed for three years. She secured The Wolf of Wall Street (2013) after slapping DiCaprio during the audition.
A fan letter to Quentin Tarantino made her his only choice to play Sharon Tate in Once Upon a Time in… Hollywood (2019). ('I adore your films, and I would love to work with you in some capacity. Or any capacity,' she wrote. He invited her over for a four-hour script-reading at his house, replete with Victoria Bitter, an Australian beer.)
This tenacity was developed early in life. Born in the rural Australian town of Dalby on 2 July 1990, Robbie later moved with her family to Southport, on Queensland's Gold Coast, where she grew up in a loud, busy household, the second youngest of four.
Her family's affectionate nickname for her was Maggot, now her Zoom screen name. However, when she was five her parents divorced after her father, a sugarcane tycoon, left her physiotherapist mum. It created a father/daughter rift that still hasn't fully healed. She remains so devoted to her mother that she paid off her mortgage as soon as the big cheques started to arrive.
Robbie and husband Tom Ackerley at the 2024 baftas
As a child, she tried circus school (and still does stunts when playing roles such as Harley Quinn in Suicide Squad, 2016).
A part in a local indie movie attracted an agent and she moved to Melbourne aged 16 to give acting a try. After a few years of couch-surfing, she was snowboarding in Canada when she learned she had won the role of Freedman in Neighbours. Three years later she made her US debut in the TV drama Pan Am (2011).
1990: Born on 2 July on the rural town of Dalby, Queensland, on the east coast of Australia
The first thing Robbie discovered, as she sat alone in her trailer, was that she missed the canteen camaraderie of Neighbours. The next realisation, post-The Wolf of Wall Street, in which she played the blonde bombshell wife of DiCaprio's Jordan Belfort, was that she hated her sex-symbol status.
'I remember saying to my mom, 'I don't think I want to do this', she told Vanity Fair. 'And she just looked at me, completely straight-faced, and was like, 'Darling, I think it's too late not to.' That's when I realised the only way was forward.'
Helen Mirren isn't alone in having commented on Robbie's looks. But, according to Josie Rourke, who directed Robbie's Bafta-nominated role as Elizabeth I in 2018's Mary Queen of Scots, that misses the point. 'People line her up with a very 20th-century idea of female sexuality,' she says. 'But Margot is an inherently 21st-century performer.'
2007: Now living on the Gold Coast, she appears on TV as a customer in an ad for raunchy Hooters restaurant
Alongside 21st-century performer/producer powerhouses such as Reese Witherspoon and Scarlett Johansson, Robbie set about making the films she wanted to see – helped by meeting assistant directors Josey McNamara and Tom Ackerley, both British, on the set of the 2013 Anglo-French war movie Suite Française.
From Robbie's Clapham kitchen in 2014, the three of them – plus Robbie's childhood friend Sophie Kerr – set up a production company called LuckyChap.
They were drunk, but Robbie thinks they named it after South London silent-movie star Charlie Chaplin. She knows, however, that she fell for Ackerley very early on. They started dating that year and got married near Robbie's Australian hometown in 2016. She asked her mother to walk her down the aisle.
2008: Robbie joins the cast of Neighbours as Donna Freedman, a role she plays until 2011; 2011:Moves to LA and is cast as a flight attendant in TV series Pan Am
LuckyChap set about searching for female stories and, in the meantime, Robbie was making short work of journalists who assumed she'd be taking time off to have kids. 'The first question in almost every interview is 'Babies? When are you having one?' she fumed to one hapless hack. 'Don't presume. I'll do what I'm going to do.'
Which was producing and starring in I, Tonya, about US figure skater Tonya Harding's involvement in a 1994 attack on rival Nancy Kerrigan. Released in 2017, three Oscar nominations and one win followed. Robbie may not have won Best Actress, but the film began her rise to mini-mogul.
2013: Stars in The Wolf of Wall Street alongside Leonardo DiCaprio; 2014: Has a ball living in South London, partying regularly at Clapham nightclub Infernos
Film critic Ian Nathan says LuckyChap's closest competitor is Brad Pitt's Plan B, recently bought by French studio Mediawan for $300 million. Reese Witherspoon's Hello Sunshine was sold in August 2021 for three times that. LuckyChap has a more consistent box-office hit rate than both.
Robbie is involved in every decision the company makes, including helping to design its new downtown LA office. The Gold Coast girl told Architectural Digest she wanted lots of open space, and insisted the kitchen be at the centre of everything, in homage to her Clapham flat.
Her own Venice Beach LA home with Ackerley – 'just a five-minute skateboard ride away,' she delights in saying – is similarly airy, with high wood-beamed ceilings and a pool where Robbie starts each day with a swim. She is also notably adroit at dodging paparazzi, who say they only catch sight of her on the screen or on the red carpet. 'She does seem to avoid the photographers if she's out and about in LA,' sighs one.
2015: Explains sub-prime loans while taking a bubble bath in Adam McKay's The Big Short; 2016: Marries former London flatmate Tom Ackerley at a private ceremony near her birthplace, Dalby
2017: LuckyChap production I, Tonya is released, grossing $52 million. A first Oscar nomination for Robbie; 2018: Attends the Golden Globes Awards in a Gucci gown, in black satin, to support the Time's Up movement
'Robbie's career is strange – it's classic Hollywood Bergman, Bacall or Bette Davis with hits and flops,' says Nathan. 'She's played in superhero movies, epics, comedies… What LuckyChap does is put her in charge, even if two films bomb.'
Robbie secured the rights to Barbie in 2018, shortly after I, Tonya. She figured it would make a silly, smart comedy 'like Austin Powers' and told Warner Bros that it would gross over $1 billion. This appeared to be an insane claim to a studio that, in its entire history, had only produced five films that big – one Hobbit, the last Harry Potter and three Batman films. But she was right.
She hunted down director Greta Gerwig and personally protected her from Mattel and Warner Bros. 'And then when I saw the script, I was like, 'They're never going to let us do this. This is really pushing it',' Robbie told Time magazine last July.
During filming in spring 2022 at Warner Bros Studios Leavesden, north of London, Robbie loved organising cast and crew challenges and treats.
There was a competition for holding a plank – a tough core strength exercise. The average time for most healthy 20somethings is 90 seconds for women and two minutes for men. Ryan Gosling killed it with three minutes and two seconds but Robbie left him in the dust with four minutes ten.
She hosted what she called a 'movie church' every Sunday morning at the Electric Cinema in Notting Hill, showing films she and Gerwig saw as Barbie influences – Powell & Pressburger's The Red Shoes, Howard Hawks's His Girl Friday, Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey – even Hitchcock's Rear Window.
She also briefly owned all of the pink paint available in London. It's an offbeat, family-style way to make a film and it seems to be the LuckyChap method.
2019: Becomes the last Chanel ambassador to be picked by the late creative director Karl Lagerfeld; 2020: Produces and stars in Birds of Prey, the first superhero film both written and directed solely by women
This includes developing talent like Emerald Fennell, the 38-year-old British actress, writer and film maker. LuckyChap produced her 2020 hit Promising Young Woman (for which Fennell won the Oscar for Best Original Screenplay), co-produced her Saltburn, the meme-machine starring new heartthrob Barry Keoghan, and cast Fennell in a Barbie cameo. Fennell credits Robbie with nurturing her work: 'She stands behind you and doesn't care if it gets her into trouble,' she told an interviewer in November 2022. 'I felt safe and in Hollywood, that's no small thing.'
Despite producing the biggest moneyspinner of the year, neither Robbie nor Gerwig was nominated in the Best Director and Best Actress categories for tonight's awards. The uproar this caused is a measure of the respect Robbie holds.
'There is no Ken without Barbie,' Ryan Gosling said the day after the nominations.
Many film critics have since debated if her Barbie role was truly worthy of an Oscar, but the fan outrage was a sign of the film's impact. The past year was a tough one for Hollywood. Expected hits (Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny, The Little Mermaid, Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One) all underperformed.
Perhaps people had given up going to the cinema post-Covid? Then came the trending social media meme 'Barbenheimer' (Barbie and Oppenheimer were released on the same day last July) and the Barbie-themed summer parties. Cinemagoing was an event again.
2021: Emerald Fennell lands Best Original Screenplay Oscar for the Robbie-produced Promising Young Woman: Co-stars with Brad Pitt in film 'dramedy' Babylon, by Damien Chazelle, director of La La Land
Holidaying in Scotland just after Barbie launched, Robbie overheard a stag party in a pub discussing the film – one was insisting Barbie was a cultural feminist moment while another was refusing to watch it. She walked over to their table and thanked her champion. 'It took a while for them to work out who I was,' she told an audience at an industry screening last December. 'Then they lost it.'
Robbie herself sidestepped the best actress row graciously. 'There's no way to feel sad when you're this blessed,' she said cheerfully at a recent panel discussion. Barbie set out to 'shift culture, affect culture, just make some sort of impact.
And it's already done that'.
She's right. The film's $1.4 billion box office makes Gerwig the highest-grossing female director of all time and so many productions post-Barbie have been female-skewed projects, according to industry newsletter Puck, that Hollywood is facing a 'dude slump'. For a company that shot its first film in 2017, this is phenomenal.
As producer, Robbie could yet pick up the Best Picture gong – and she managed to steal the headlines at this year's Baftas with a figure-hugging, Barbie-pink Armani Privé dress without winning a thing. Expect her to own this evening anyway. And the future.
'Robbie has deftly used her growing fame to position her company further up the value chain,' says industry expert Tom Harrington. 'Now it's a question of creating bankable projects that don't star her. Promising Young Woman and Saltburn are both great films and fit within the company's philosophy of female-led projects, but provide more online meme success than box-office returns.'
Business looks promising. LuckyChap recently signed deals with Warner Bros and Netflix. The former revived a tradition not honoured since founder Jack Warner died in 1978, handing Robbie a key to the studio; an original 1956 key at that. The first film in production is an Ocean's Eleven prequel with Robbie producing and acting opposite Barbie co-star Gosling that is expected to be released next year.
2023: LuckyChap releases Fennell's Saltburn (starring Barry Keoghan, above) and Greta Gerwig's Barbie; 2024: Robbie, Josey McNamara (left) and Tom Ackerley sign a first-look deal for LuckyChap with Warner Studios
She's appearing with Colin Farrell in A Big Bold Beautiful Journey, a quirky romance about a magical mystery tour in a VW Beetle with a mind of its own, also for release in 2025. She's producing Naughty with Olivia Wilde: a Christmas comedy described as 'Bridesmaids at the North Pole'. One thing she's not working on is a Barbie sequel.
'Why can't it be another big, original, bold idea where we get an amazing film-maker, a big budget to play with, and the trust of a huge conglomerate behind them to go and really play? I want to do that,' she told Variety in January.
When I think back to our interview I remember her saying she had no idea if she'd ever star in a film as big or crazy as The Wolf of Wall Street again in her career. Then I read an interview in industry bible Deadline, also in January.
In it, she described watching Gerwig and her crew build the world of Barbie, thinking. 'So few people know how to do this and we're killing it.
'It's often dismissed as popcorn,' she told the interviewer. 'Mate, it's the big leagues, is what it is.'
I love that quote. It sounds exactly like the backpacker sitting across the table a decade ago. She's one of the biggest stars in the world. She's building a production powerhouse worth millions of dollars.
Studios are begging her to sign. And how does she describe it?
'Mate, it's the big leagues, is what it is.'