She may be playing Barbie, but Hollywood didn’t always seem like a dream house to Margot Robbie. As it turns out, Robbie almost left the scene altogether after her breakout film, The Wolf of Wall Street.
In a recent Vanity Fair profile, Margot Robbie revealed that she felt the pressures of immediate superstardom. “Something was happening in those early stages and it was all pretty awful, and I remember saying to my mom, ‘I don’t think I want to do this.’ 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 realized the only way was forward.”
And forward she went, catapulting into the Hollywood stratosphere. Hearing that Margot Robbie considered leaving the movie industry makes one think about how much the movies would have missed: a memorable iteration of Harley Quinn for Suicide Squad and Birds of Prey; an Oscar-nominated turn as Tonya Harding in I, Tonya; an emotional victim amalgamation in Bombshell (another Oscar nod); and a genuinely underappreciated performance as Sharon Tate in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood.
Margot Robbie has, of course, kept her post-Wolf of Wall Street momentum going, and she is poised to have some of her most significant years yet. Her last movie of 2022 is Damien Chazelle’s Babylon, while 2023 will see her playing Barbie for Greta Gerwig and acting in the new Wes Anderson movie Asteroid City.
For her Babylon character, Robbie studied legendary actress Clara Bow and animals that might have similar movements to her character. With Barbie, she is ready to keep viewers on their toes. “Let me subvert your expectations. It’s much scarier, but it’s also a great place to begin.”
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