Margot Robbie

• 1. Introduction

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  Margot Robbie, born in Queensland on the 2nd of July 1990, owes the start of her career to a switchboard mistake. As a teenager she phoned the production company FremantleMedia every day. Then, as she told the story on The Graham Norton Show, "One day, I got put through by accident to the casting director for Neighbours." She said, "I'm in town working on something." The casting director asked her age. She answered seventeen, and was told that was exactly what they were looking for.

  Nobody on that call could have guessed where it would lead. By 2023 she was the world's highest-paid actress. She has been nominated for three Academy Awards, four Golden Globe Awards and six British Academy Film Awards. Yet the name on the screen is only part of her story, because she also builds the films she stars in.

  This documentary asks how a child of a farming family ended up on those lists. It asks what she did to vanish into villains, queens and figure skaters. And it asks how a production company she co-founded came to make a film about the most famous fashion doll in the world.

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• 2. Farm Girl Origins

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  Doug Robbie, her father, was a former farm-owner and sugarcane tycoon, and her mother, Sarie Kessler, worked as a physiotherapist. Margot was the third of four children, with an older sister, an older brother and a younger brother. Her father's side of the family was Scottish. The family lived in the rural town of Dalby until she turned five, when her father separated from them. They then moved to her mother's hometown, the Gold Coast, and spent most of her childhood on her grandparents' farm in the Currumbin Valley.

  Robbie later recalled that she and her siblings "didn't make life easy" for their single mother. They fought often, and she remembered that her mother had to be a "very strong woman to hold things together". Away from the squabbles, the children went boar hunting and surfing. Robbie grew interested in agriculture and animal husbandry, an upbringing she called one "you'd never expect to lead anyone into acting".

  Classmates nicknamed her "Maggot". The name began when a teacher mispronounced her name at roll call, and it stayed with her into adulthood. At home she liked to stage performances, so her mother enrolled her in a circus school. There she excelled at the trapeze and earned a certificate at the age of eight.

  In her teens she became obsessed with the Harry Potter novels. She admitted that she once lied to an optometrist so she could get glasses like the young wizard's. At Somerset College she studied drama, and she held three jobs at the same time. She tended bar, cleaned houses and worked at Subway. After graduating, with some experience in commercials and independent thriller films, she moved to Melbourne to act professionally.

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• 3. Soap Opera Apprenticeship

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  Two low-budget independent thrillers, Vigilante and I.C.U., were Robbie's first acting jobs, shot while she was still in high school. Both reached audiences years later. She described being on a film set as "a dream come true".

  Her television debut came in 2008, in a guest part as Caitlin Brentford on the drama series City Homicide. She followed it with a two-episode arc on the children's series The Elephant Princess, where she appeared with Liam Hemsworth.

  In June 2008 she began playing Donna Freedman on Neighbours. The part was supposed to be a guest role, but the producers promoted her to the regular cast soon after her first appearance. Over her three years on the soap, she earned two Logie Award nominations.

  Shortly after arriving in America, she won the part of Laura Cameron in the period drama Pan Am, which aired in 2011. Cameron was a newly trained flight attendant. The series opened to high ratings and positive reviews, but falling numbers got it cancelled after a single season.

  Neighbours would call her back much later. In 2022 she returned as Donna Freedman for the soap's final episode.

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• 4. Breakthrough Years

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  A British accent was part of Robbie's job in About Time, Richard Curtis' 2013 romantic comedy. She played the unattainable teenage love of a character played by Domhnall Gleeson, with Rachel McAdams also in the cast. The story follows a young man who can travel in time and hopes to repair his past. The film did modestly at the box office.

  Her real breakthrough arrived the same year. In Martin Scorsese's black comedy The Wolf of Wall Street, she played Naomi Lapaglia, the wife of protagonist Jordan Belfort. She won the part by improvising a slap on co-star Leonardo DiCaprio during a fight scene at her audition. Reviewers praised her Brooklyn accent. Critic Sasha Stone wrote, "She's Scorsese's best blonde bombshell discovery since Cathy Moriarty in Raging Bull. Robbie is funny, hard and kills every scene she's in."

  The film grossed $392 million worldwide, the biggest total of Scorsese's career up to that point. Robbie was nominated for the MTV Movie Award for Best Breakthrough Performance and won the Empire Award for Best Newcomer. The attention rattled her, and she considered quitting acting. Her mother calmly told her it was probably too late for that, and Robbie stayed.

  Four of her films were released in 2015. In Focus, a romantic comedy-drama that grossed $158.8 million, she played an inexperienced grifter learning from Will Smith's character. For the role she learned pickpocketing from Apollo Robbins. Reviews were mixed, but Peter Travers of Rolling Stone wrote, "Robbie is wow and then some. Even when Focus fumbles, she deals a winning hand." She was nominated for the Rising Star Award at the 68th British Academy Film Awards.

  Suite Française put her beside Michelle Williams and Kristin Scott Thomas, in a drama based on the second part of Irène Némirovsky's 2004 novel. She played a woman falling for a German soldier in occupied France. Leslie Felperin of The Hollywood Reporter found the role "underwritten".

  Z for Zachariah gave her a first leading part. Director Craig Zobel cast her as Ann Burden, caught in a love triangle with the last known survivors of a nuclear disaster, played by Chris Pine and Chiwetel Ejiofor. She dyed her hair brown and learned an Appalachian accent. Drew McWeeny of HitFix wrote that "Robbie's work here establishes her as one of the very best actresses in her age range today."

  Her fourth 2015 release was a cameo in Adam McKay's The Big Short. She breaks the fourth wall to explain subprime mortgages from a bathtub. Six years later, when the GameStop short squeeze hit the news, that scene became a trending topic again.

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• 5. Becoming Harley Quinn

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  In 2016 Robbie reunited with directors Glenn Ficarra and John Requa for Whiskey Tango Foxtrot, playing a British war correspondent opposite Tina Fey and Martin Freeman. Later that year she took the part of Jane Porter in David Yates' The Legend of Tarzan. She insisted on not losing weight and on making sure Jane was no damsel in distress, unlike in earlier Tarzan adaptations. Reviews were generally unfavourable. Still, Manohla Dargis of The New York Times credited her for "holding her own" beside Alexander Skarsgård and Samuel L. Jackson.

  Then came the role that defined her blockbuster career. In David Ayer's Suicide Squad, Robbie became the first person to play the DC Comics villain Harley Quinn in live action. The ensemble included Will Smith, Jared Leto and Viola Davis. She admitted she had never read the comics, but she felt a huge responsibility to do the character justice and satisfy fans.

  She began preparing six months before shooting. Her schedule covered gymnastics, boxing, aerial silk training and learning to hold her breath underwater for five minutes. She performed most of her own stunts. The film earned $746.8 million worldwide, making it the tenth-highest-grossing film of 2016, and her performance was widely seen as its prime asset. Stephanie Zacharek of Time called her "a criminally appealing actress, likable in just about every way", and Christopher Orr of The Atlantic called the performance "genuinely terrific". She won the People's Choice Award for Favourite Action Movie Actress and the Critics' Choice Movie Award for Best Actress in an Action Movie.

  By 2015 she had already pitched a female ensemble action film to Warner Bros. She then spent three years developing it under her own production company, deliberately hiring a female director and screenwriter. The result was Cathy Yan's Birds of Prey in 2020. Ian Freer of Empire wrote that "the MVP is Robbie, who lends Harley charming quirk and believable menace". She received two nominations at the 46th People's Choice Awards.

  Her third outing as Quinn came in 2021 with The Suicide Squad, written and directed by James Gunn. Because of the COVID-19 pandemic, it opened in cinemas and on HBO Max at the same time. Owen Gleiberman praised her "delectable performance".

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• 6. Real Women On Screen

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  Before playing Tonya Harding in I, Tonya, Robbie met Harding herself. The 2017 sports black comedy revolves around the 1994 assault on rival skater Nancy Kerrigan. Robbie also watched old footage and interviews, and worked with a voice coach to capture Harding's Pacific Northwest accent and vocal timbre at different ages. She trained for several months with skating choreographer Sarah Kawahara.

  The film premiered at the 2017 Toronto International Film Festival to critical acclaim. James Luxford of Metro called it her best performance to date. Mark Kermode of The Observer described it as "a tour-de-force tornado that balances finely nuanced character development with impressively punchy physicality". Robbie was nominated for Best Actress at the Academy Awards, the British Academy Film Awards, the Golden Globes, the Screen Actors Guild Awards and the Critics' Choice Movie Awards.

  Queen Elizabeth I was a different kind of challenge. In Josie Rourke's Mary Queen of Scots, Robbie played the cousin of Saoirse Ronan's title character, in a story about the 1569 conflict between their two countries. She had first turned the part down because she was "terrified" of not living up to earlier portrayals. Every shooting day began with three hours in the make-up chair, where a prosthetic nose and painted boils and blisters were applied. Critics dismissed the screenplay and its historical inaccuracies but praised both leads. She earned nominations for a BAFTA Award and a Screen Actors Guild Award.

  In 2019, Quentin Tarantino told her she was his only choice to play the late actress Sharon Tate in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. The film uses the Tate-LaBianca murders as a backdrop while following a fading actor, played by Leonardo DiCaprio, and his stunt double, played by Brad Pitt. Feeling "an enormous sense of responsibility", Robbie met Tate's family and friends, watched all of Tate's films and read the autobiography of Tate's then-husband, Roman Polanski. The film premiered at the 2019 Cannes Film Festival and grossed $374.3 million. Many people lamented how few lines Robbie had. Even so, Robbie Collin of The Daily Telegraph picked out a cinema scene with her as the film's "most delightful".

  Bombshell, also from 2019, gave her Kayla Pospisil, a composite of several Fox News employees. The film, directed by Jay Roach, stars Charlize Theron and Nicole Kidman and recounts the sexual harassment of women at the network by chairman Roger Ailes. Robbie modelled her character's accent on Katherine Harris. Kenneth Turan of the Los Angeles Times wrote that her story's arc was "so crushing that it stays with you the longest". For Bombshell she was nominated for an Academy Award, a Golden Globe and a Screen Actors Guild Award, all for Best Supporting Actress. Together with Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, it brought her two BAFTA nominations in that category.

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• 7. Producer Behind Barbie

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  By the end of 2022, two of her biggest releases had stumbled. David O. Russell's Amsterdam, built around the 1933 Business Plot, was a critical and commercial failure. Damien Chazelle's Babylon polarised critics and did poorly at the box office. In it she played Nellie LaRoy, an actress inspired by silent movie star Clara Bow. She studied Bow's work and researched her traumatic childhood, calling LaRoy "the most physically and emotionally draining character I've ever played". Caryn James of BBC Culture wrote that her performance made Nellie "a daring, endlessly spiraling, sympathetic figure". Robbie earned another Golden Globe nomination for Best Actress. Still, commentators briefly branded her "box office poison".

  The answer was already in motion through LuckyChap Entertainment. Robbie founded it in 2014 with her future husband, Tom Ackerley, and their longtime friends Sophia Kerr and Josey McNamara. The aim was to make more female-driven projects, and the name was inspired by Charlie Chaplin. I, Tonya was its first release. The company also produced Dreamland, a poorly received crime thriller set in the 1930s Dust Bowl, and Robbie executive produced the Hulu comedy Dollface, which ran from 2019 to 2022. She served as a producer on Emerald Fennell's Promising Young Woman, starring Carey Mulligan, which was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Picture. She was also an executive producer on the Netflix miniseries Maid in 2021.

  Barbie was the biggest bet. In 2018 Robbie secured the film rights from Mattel. She hired Greta Gerwig to write and direct, and she took the title role herself after Gal Gadadot declined her offer. Gerwig and Robbie prepared by watching old Technicolor musicals, including The Red Shoes from 1948 and The Umbrellas of Cherbourg from 1964. Ryan Gosling played Ken. Variety reported that Robbie earned $12.5 million for the part, the highest pay for an actress in Hollywood that year. Alison Willmore of Vulture praised how she combined "heartbreaking earnestness" and "humor".

  The film grossed over $1.4 billion worldwide, her highest-grossing release. Robbie received further BAFTA and Golden Globe nominations for acting. As a producer she was also nominated for the Academy Award for Best Picture.

  The pace did not slow. In 2023 she had a single scene in Wes Anderson's Asteroid City, and she produced Fennell's Saltburn. Megan Park's comedy My Old Ass, which Robbie produced, reached the 2024 Sundance Film Festival. In 2025 she starred opposite Colin Farrell in Kogonada's A Big Bold Beautiful Journey. On the 13th of February 2026, Fennell's Wuthering Heights opened in cinemas, with Robbie as Catherine Earnshaw and Jacob Elordi as Heathcliff. Her next project is a Tim Burton remake of Attack of the 50 Foot Woman, in which a wealthy heiress grows to giant size after an alien encounter.

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• 8. Fame, Family, Causes

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  For Time's 2017 list of the 100 most influential people, Martin Scorsese wrote Robbie's entry himself. He praised "a unique audacity that surprises and challenges and just burns like a brand into every character she plays". That same year she made the Forbes 30 Under 30 list. Vanity Fair had named her one of its breakthrough actors of 2013, and in 2019 Forbes put her annual earnings at $23.5 million. Forbes later reported her 2023 earnings at $78 million. Fashion houses noticed too. She became an ambassador for Calvin Klein, Nissan and Chanel, and she was the last ambassador Karl Lagerfeld chose before his death in February 2019.

  Despite the attention, Robbie rarely talks about her private life. In the early 2010s she moved from Melbourne to Williamsburg, Brooklyn, having shared a flat with her Neighbours co-star Ashleigh Brewer. There she became an avid ice hockey fan. She supports the New York Rangers and once played right wing in an amateur league.

  She met British assistant director Tom Ackerley on the set of Suite Française in 2013. As a child, Ackerley had worked as an extra in the first three Harry Potter films, the series Robbie had loved since her own childhood. In 2014 she moved to London with Ackerley and the other LuckyChap co-founders, and the two began dating later that year. They married in a private ceremony in Byron Bay, Australia, in December 2016. They live in Venice Beach, California, and their son was born in 2024.

  Robbie has spoken up for human rights, women's rights, gender equality and LGBTQ rights. In 2014 she took part in a fundraising event for the Motion Picture & Television Fund, which helps people in film and television with few resources, and she joined it again in 2018 and 2020. In 2015 she helped raise $12 million through the BGC Global Charity Day. In 2016 she joined a petition with other celebrities and staff of the UN Refugee Agency, backing families forced to flee conflict and persecution. She also joined Oxfam's "I Hear You" project and gave more than 50,000 dollars to UNICEF's "Children First" campaign for refugee children.

  In October 2016 she hosted the season 42 premiere of Saturday Night Live, which drew the show's strongest season-premiere ratings in eight years. Her sketches included a parody of Ivanka Trump. During the broadcast she wore a T-shirt reading "Say 'I Do' Down Under", with a rainbow-coloured map of Australia, to support same-sex marriage in her home country. A year later she joined fellow actor Chris Hemsworth in the same cause. In 2018 she pledged support to the Time's Up initiative against harassment and discrimination.

  In April 2021 she was named the first recipient of the RAD Impact Award for inspiring purpose through philanthropy. She chose to share the prize with Youngcare, a charity she had worked with before. The resulting donation funded a project for young people with extensive care needs.

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