Nostalgic, nodding to herself, Margot Robbie walks around the deserted London bar a little in the manner of a soldier returning to the site of a heavy battle. A few years ago, when the Australian actor’s film career was getting going, when she was a Neighbours graduate who had been cast in a Martin Scorsese film, The Wolf Of Wall Street, Robbie lived nearby. The 27-year-old was one of a cluster of friends who squeezed into a rented home in Clapham meant for half that number, to save money. In the evenings, to stretch their limbs and get drunk, the gang would roll out to this bar.
“The best times,” says Robbie, remembering meandering conversations, in-jokes, budding love affairs and business decisions, big hangovers. The bar looks different at 10 in the morning, day-lit, set up for brunch. But, she remembers, there used to be a good sofa upstairs, past the table-football table, near the fireplace... “Here,” she says, pleased, settling in.
Robbie left London about a year ago, around the time she married her husband, Tom Ackerley, and moved to Los Angeles. She has flown back in to attend a screening of her new film, I, Tonya, ahead of its UK release. In a few hours she’ll be at a posh cinema, sitting in the dark and evaluating the audience’s every response. Robbie stars in this dark, low-budget comedy-biopic about the wayward American figure skater, Tonya Harding – and also produced it. This means having more skin in the game. It means “daily emails, saying what percentage we’re up or down in what cities, what demographics are responding in what way, what the reviews are saying”. Robbie collapses back on the sofa. “Super nerve-racking. Super exciting. I hadn’t been involved in this part before.”
She shucks off layers: an overcoat belonging to a girlfriend, a scarf she pinched from around the throat of her husband. About 36 hours ago, Robbie was on the east coast of Australia, visiting her mum; her piecemeal outfit was assembled early this morning after the actor opened her suitcase and realised she’d flown to wintry Europe without remembering to pack any warm clothes. Tanned, with Oz-sunned hair, she is by some distance the healthiest-looking person in the bar. Waiters ferrying brunch plates put some extra dash in their stride; the guy bringing her a cup tea gets flustered arranging the sugars; the one dog in the place seeks her out. Only a slightly dazed, finger-clicky energy gives away the fact that Robbie is trying to outrun some pretty serious jet lag, pinging everywhere and anywhere around the world, trying to give her movie its best chance of success.
“Don’t jinx me!” she says, when it’s pointed out that early indicators have been promising. But they have. At the Oscars in March, Robbie will be up for the best actress award against the big guns: Meryl Streep; Frances McDormand. Judges for the Golden Globes liked I, Tonya enough to give it three big-category nominations, and one win: for Allison Janney, in a supporting role as Harding’s mother LaVona. With the director, Craig Gillespie, and screenwriter, Steven Rogers, Robbie has managed the very delicate trick of presenting a subject who is both ridiculous and utterly sympathetic; a victim we’re not encouraged to patronise and a culprit we don’t much feel like condemning. Harding herself, now living in happy obscurity, gave the finished film her blessing.
I, Tonya is especially successful when dealing with the central contradiction of Harding’s life. She is infamous for a single, shocking act of violence – an attack, in January 1994, on a rival American figure-skater, Nancy Kerrigan, that was orchestrated by Harding’s ex-husband, Jeff Gillooly. Gillooly’s notion had been to hospitalise Kerrigan and so further Harding’s sporting chances. The crime, quickly exposed, made news worldwide; it made Harding notorious, reviled, an easy joke. What was never so well understood was the violence that underpinned her own life. Harding was beaten by an abusive mother and beaten by Gillooly when they were married. The new biopic crystalises this essential irony with a daring, show-stealing joke that’s delivered direct to camera by Robbie. “Nancy gets hit once,” she drawls, summoning Harding’s wry humour, “and the whole world sh*ts.”
Rogers’ script for I, Tonya had been doing the industry rounds for a while when Robbie and some colleagues secured the rights. Domestic violence featured heavily from its earliest writing, the portrayal of it sometimes on the border between seriousness and silliness. Was Robbie ever uneasy about this particular strand of humour? “Oh, from the get-go, from the second I read the script,” Robbie says. “I worried about the handling of the domestic violence and how we would achieve a specific tone.”
Though she did not meet Harding herself until a few weeks before the shoot, Robbie’s instinct was that to leave out the violence in her home life would have felt like a kind of censorship, “a disservice to Tonya and to anyone who suffered from domestic violence”. At the same time, they were supposed to be making a comedy. Gillespie “came up with the idea of breaking the fourth wall in those moments – to look at the camera. And that made sense to me, because Tonya’s emotionally disconnecting from what happens to her in those moments. You can see the character has accepted it [the violence], as just ‘the way life is’, as she put it. It was a repetitive cycle, so regular for her she could speak about it matter-of-factly.”
To be a part of dicey decisions about tone, to have a greater stake in artistic risk: this was why Robbie wanted to produce. “Not just,” she says, “to be the face of the film with – oh well! – no say in how it was written. Or rewritten. Or directed. Or budgeted. Or marketed. Or who it was sold to. Or how.”
It’s not a coincidence that this is the first time in a five- or six-year movie career Robbie has played the lead. She’s been in superhero flicks (2016’s Suicide Squad) and Oscar worthies (a cameo as herself in 2015’s The Big Short); there are some fascinating supporting roles coming up, not least as Elizabeth I in Josie Rourke’s Mary Queen Of Scots.
But this is the first time she’s been able to ring home and say: “Mum, I’m the main part.” Previously, Robbie says bluntly, she’d been bet-hedging. “It’s a big step, playing a lead, a step I’ve been hesitant to make. All the weight of the film rests on your shoulders. And if it doesn’t work? It’s that much harder for you to get a lead role again – especially if you’re a woman.”
Robbie leans forward and bunches her fingers, a characteristic gesture. “I feel like guys get a few more chances to be the lead in a flop. If you’re a woman, and it flops? Good luck getting another one.”
The third of four siblings, Robbie grew up on Australia’s Gold Coast, a train-hop south of Brisbane, in Queensland. Her mother is a physiotherapist, her father worked in farming; they separated early in Robbie’s life, an event that shaped a large part of her adult character, she says, though she’s loth to talk about it in detail. Robbie was sporty, competitive, took part in school plays, got especially good grades in legal studies. When she graduated she was 17, “and everyone said I should go to university, study law”.
But she’d noticed, growing up, that whenever her mother spoke of her own youth she zeroed in on the exciting stuff – the adventure, the backpacking, never the study. “I decided I didn’t want to spend money I didn’t have, on a subject I didn’t want to do, only to be paying back debt for the rest of my life. Why abide by that invisible rule?”
She went south to Melbourne instead, and took a day job in a Subway fast-food restaurant. Her medium-term plans were to get work acting, or to travel, and in the end she managed both, fitting in a backpacking tour of Europe in the middle of a two-year, 327-episode run as a regular on Neighbours. When her soap contract came to an end she was offered a renewal, but instead chose to get on a plane again, this time to America. She was cast in a new TV series, about 1960s cabin crews, called Pan Am.
Some actors start out at a Rada or a Juilliard, others set themselves to follow the example of a Brando or a Day-Lewis, but Robbie had trained at the Ramsay Street school and it was there that she learned a professional technique that has always served her well: let’s call it the no-trailer method. “On Neighbours there were no trailers,” she says, “you just, like, sat with everyone.” Karl and Susan, the sparkies, the assistant directors, they all sloshed around together in a big room during lulls. “You shared the kitchen. You hung out.”
When Robbie got her gig in Pan Am, which was broadcast for a few months before its cancellation in 2012, she found it “lonely. You were supposed to be all segregated into different departments, which felt weird. I remember knocking on other people’s doors and saying: ‘Uh, do you want to hang out?’ ” She liked the informal nooks where the runners and makeup deputies and third-rung assistant directors (the third ADs) killed time. “I don’t know, I was closer in age to them. They seemed more like my friends from back home.”
Soon after the show’s cancellation, Robbie, gutted but unchastened, angry-auditioned herself into some big movies. “I would go in thinking: ‘You ****ing wait, look up from your papers, watch me, I’m going to blow your ****ing mind.’”
Scorsese cast her in The Wolf Of Wall Street, as Leonardo DiCaprio’s wife, the director especially impressed that she’d had the guts to thump an unprepared DiCaprio, mid-reading. She was in a Richard Curtis movie, About Time, and then supplemented a star-rich cast adaptation of Suite Française, shot on location in Belgium. The sets had scaled up, so had Robbie’s pay cheques, but she kept finding herself gravitating to the circles of folding chairs where the runners and teamsters gathered. On Suite Française, the troupe of third ADs were drawn mostly from London. “We became really close. You spend so much time with your crew – I mean, if you want to.”
The Australian accent had stuck with her from home, as had her Australian appreciation for a good nickname. The new gang did not disappoint on this score. “I got called Maggie, Margz, Mags, Maggles…” Suite Française was ultimately a forgettable film, but the drunken nights out were memorable, and a tight friendship group formed. Promises were made to stay in touch, and a little while later, in January 2014, when Robbie was coming through London for the premiere of Wolf Of Wall Street, the gang regathered. Paramount had put her up in a ritzy hotel room. Everyone packed in.
“We were like: ‘Wouldn’t it be funny if we all lived together?’ Someone said: ‘But you don’t live in London,’ and I said: ‘I don’t live anywhere. I’ll move.’ Three days later we signed a lease in Clapham. I didn’t even see the place – I had to fly out to the Golden Globes [where Wolf Of Wall Street had been twice nominated] three hours after we made the decision.”
“Obviously ADs get paid like ****. So we had to, ah,” Robbie chuckles, “fit quite a few people in to a small place.” Five ADs, a rising movie star, an old friend from Australia, Sophia Kerr, now working as Robbie’s assistant. That made seven, all crammed into a three-bedroom home. Robbie had booked a job in London for a year, a CGI-heavy remake of The Legend Of Tarzan that was eventually released in 2016. At around the same time one of the housemates, Tom Ackerley, was third-ADing on a Mission: Impossible sequel.
At the start of their relationship, Robbie recalls: “We kept it a secret. Because we weren’t really taking it seriously. ‘Oh, whatever, we’re just mates, we’re just mates.’ And then… everyone found out.”
Was that awkward, two of the seven coupling up?
Robbie draws out a long: “Ummm”. She’s thinking about how much she wants to commit to the record here. “It was dramatic. I’m not going into the details, but **** hit the fan. Our house turned into The Jerry Springer Show for a moment there. But then the dust settled, and it was all good.”
The wider friendship survived? “Everyone was, like: ‘No! This is going to ruin our group!’ And then it didn’t. It was fine.”
