
THE HOLLYWOOD REPORTER – Figure skating’s most notorious character shares memories of the scandal that ended her career with the star who plays her — and reveals she’s back in training.
Margot Robbie waited until filming was just about to begin before she and director Craig Gillespie took a trip to Portland to have lunch with the woman she was about to play. Their second meeting came nearly a year later, when Tonya Harding joined Robbie on the red carpet for I, Tonya‘s Hollywood premiere. The following day, on Dec. 6, Robbie sat down with Harding, 47, for a wide-ranging conversation about the disgraced Olympian’s life now with her current husband, Joe, a heating and air conditioning specialist, and their 6-year-old son, Gordon, as well as the highs and lows of her days on the ice.
While Robbie switched between roles as interviewer and interviewee, Harding spoke candidly about her fraught relationships with both her ex Jeff Gillooly, who spent six months in prison following the 1994 assault on Harding’s then-rival Nancy Kerrigan, and her mother, with whom she’s been estranged since the early 2000s. At one point in the hourlong discussion, during which the former competitor revealed that she was back in training (she’s set to skate in an exhibition at Rockefeller Center in late January), a teary Harding thanked Robbie for not only telling her story but also providing her with closure. (Read the rest of the interview at the source)
THE HOLLYWOOD REPORTER An ingenue turns indie producer with the figure skating biopic ‘I, Tonya’ as she opens up about the downside of starring in ‘Suicide Squad’ (“Now you have to be able to afford security”) and maps out a plan for career longevity: “I don’t want to burn hard and fast and then disappear.”
Before Margot Robbie set out for Hollywood, an agent in her native Australia advised her to prepare to answer a question she’d inevitably be asked when she arrived.
“What do you want out of your career?”
Robbie, then 20 and starring in a local soap opera, took the advice seriously. She began scribbling pages and pages of notes before ultimately whittling her answer down to just three words: “Quality, versatility and longevity.” Nail the first two, she thought, and the third will follow.
Not a half decade later, Robbie had exploded into Hollywood with her breakthrough performance as the fiery wife of Leonardo DiCaprio’s Jordan Belfort in the 2013 box-office smash The Wolf of Wall Street. She’d taken what could have been a forgettable role — described in Terence Winter’s script as the “hottest blonde ever” — and made something memorable out of it. She was promptly deluged with offers to play the “hot wife” or “hot girlfriend” of other A-list actors. Flattered as Robbie was by the sudden attention, such inessential characters didn’t fit into her career plan, and she turned nearly all of them down. “You could read a script and almost pull them out and nothing else would be affected,” she says now, between sips of tea on her back patio in Los Angeles. “Like if you pulled out that card, the card castle wouldn’t come tumbling down, and that’s not that exciting to me.” (Read the rest of the interview at the source)
Check the beautiful cover and photoshoot Margot (and Tonya) did for this Golden Globes 2018 issue of The Hollywood Reporter!


Photoshoots & Portraits > 2018 > Session 03 | The Hollywood Reporter [+4]