WSJ – The hottest blonde ever.” This was the infamous script description given for Margot Robbie’s character in The Wolf of Wall Street (2013), directed by Martin Scorsese. Widely credited as Robbie’s breakthrough, the role instantly helped establish her as one of the biggest movie stars.

Yet Robbie—Australian born and then still relatively new to Hollywood—says that she had little interest in further riffing on the blonde-bombshell theme: “I was going to have to show people that I could do something different. I didn’t want to get pigeonholed.” Accordingly, her next roles gave the middle finger to the hot-blonde paradigm.

On Suite Française’s set, in 2013, “I play a French peasant, and trust me, I looked revolting,” she says via Zoom. (Her screen name reads “Maggot,” her childhood nickname, rather than “Margot.”) “Then I did Z for Zachariah…and again, I looked revolting. By that time, I thought, I’ve shown people.” As the smallpox-riddled Queen Elizabeth in 2018’s Mary Queen of Scots, Robbie was adorned with oozing sores, scabs and scars.

While filming Suite Française, Robbie made friends with assistant directors Josey McNamara and Tom Ackerley. Both became her business partners, along with her childhood friend Sophia Kerr; she later married Ackerley. The four discussed their mutual producing aspirations, and about what they saw as a lack of desirable film roles for women. “I remember saying, ‘Every time I pick up a script, I want to play the guy,’ ” Robbie recalls. “ ‘Wouldn’t it be so cool if people pick up scripts that we’re making and always wanted to play the female role?’ ”

They decided to found their own production company, calling it LuckyChap Entertainment. Robbie had just turned 24. (The company name was conjured while they were drunk, says Robbie; it may refer to Charlie Chaplin, but no one can really remember.) The LuckyChap mandate, from day one, was to “make female stories.” Each of its projects had to involve a female story or female storyteller. They also, says Ackerley, “wanted to find the next generation of talent,” while being “on the right side of culture.”

Getting any movie made is difficult, but Robbie, now 32, says that the LuckyChap team wasn’t daunted. “[We were] too young and dumb to know how scary [it would] be,” she says. “Starting it all off on a kitchen bench in London, everyone was like: ‘They’re such idiots…it would be a miracle if they did anything.’ ”

But the team promptly manifested just such a miracle, in the form of a spec script by screenwriter Steven Rogers that had been making the rounds: a daring redemption film about former Olympic ice-skater Tonya Harding. Others in the industry dismissed the project, Robbie recalls. “They [were] like, ‘You can’t make that…. You’ve got 200-something scenes, several locations, it’s period,’ ” says Robbie. “We read it and were like, ‘But it’s just f—ing great; it’s the best script ever, so who cares?’ ” They snatched up the option.

When playing Queen Elizabeth, Robbie says that she felt “very restrained, both emotionally and physically.” But with I, Tonya, in which she played the title role, she came out guns blazing and made her true breakthrough. Through the unlikely avatar of Harding, she broadcast the qualities that have since defined a quintessential Robbie role: extreme physicality, an overt defiance of cliché and a willingness to subsume herself entirely in a character.

I, Tonya also served as a declaration of intent for LuckyChap. The young team had just released a film that would be nominated for three Oscars in 2018, including a best performance by an actress in a leading role nomination for Robbie and a win for her co-star Allison Janney. The company and Robbie had certain things in common: Their sensibilities were unconventional, even wild. Both courted risk. And both saw infinite value and opportunity in what others had dismissed.
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THE HOLLYWOOD REPORTER – This project is separate from the already announced franchise reboot being developed by ‘Pirates’ scribe Ted Elliott and ‘Chernobyl’ creator Craig Mazin.

Margot Robbie is setting sail with help from her Birds of Prey writer Christina Hodson.

Hodson has been tapped to write a new, female-fronted Pirates of the Caribbean for Disney, with Robbie attached to star.

While plot details are being kept in Davey Jones’ locker, the project, in early development, is not intended to be a spinoff of the long-running franchise that had pirate Jack Sparrow at its center, but rather a wholly original story with new characters under the Pirates moniker, itself inspired by the long-running attraction at Disneyland.

The new project is said to be separate from the already announced reboot of the popular franchise that has Pirates scribe Ted Elliott and Chernobyl creator Craig Mazin developing the story.

Longtime Pirates producer Jerry Bruckheimer is attached to produce both the Elliott/Mazin project and this new Robbie/Hodson project.

Pirates of the Caribbean is one of the most lucrative film franchises of all time, grossing over $4.5 billion across five feature films. But the Pirates franchise, fronted by Johnny Depp, has shown its age, with the fifth installment, 2017’s Dead Men Tell No Tales, coming in with the second-lowest box office of the series ($795 million, unadjusted worldwide) only ahead of original film Curse of the Black Pearl. The studio has been plotting ways to revive the brand with stories from new talent.

Hodson is one of Hollywood’s go-to blockbuster writers, with credits that include Transformers spinoff Bumblebee as well as DC superhero projects The Flash, which now has Michael Keaton reprising his famous role of Batman, and Batgirl.

Robbie’s recent features include Bombshell and Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood, and she will next be seen in James Gunn’s The Suicide Squad sequel.

In addition to collaborating on Birds of Prey, Robbie and Hodson together in 2019 launched the Lucky Exports Pitch Program, a new initiative aimed at getting more female-identifying writers hired by studios to write action-centric movies.

Robbie is repped by CAA, Management 360, AMM and attorney Jeff Bernstein of Jackoway Austen. Hodson is repped by Kaplan/Perrone Entertainment and Ziffren Brittenham

VOGUE – MARGOT ROBBIE ALWAYS thought that once she was a good enough actor, she would write Quentin Tarantino a letter. Just to get on his radar. Or at least to let him know how much his movies meant to her. She was sure people must tell him that all the time. But still. “I’ve always been a huge—huge—Tarantino fan,” she tells me one afternoon in Los Angeles. “I love his movies. Love them.” After Robbie watched the first cut of I, Tonya, the 2017 biopic about figure skater Tonya Harding, which Robbie produced and starred in, she decided she was finally good enough. (The performance would earn her an Oscar nomination.) “So I wrote him and said, ‘I adore your films, and I would love to work with you in some capacity. Or any capacity.’ ”

When Tarantino received Robbie’s letter, he’d recently finished the script for Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, a romp through the movie industry of the late 1960s, which opens this month. Friends who’d read the script had already asked if he’d be casting Robbie in the role of Sharon Tate, the actress, wife of Roman Polanski, and most famous victim of the Manson murders. Then Robbie’s letter arrived. The timing was spooky enough that Tarantino thought they should meet. Soon Robbie was sitting at the director’s kitchen table, reading the script. Robbie is a careful reader; it took her four hours. Tarantino would occasionally pop in to offer her food or a Victoria Bitter, an Australian beer. When I later ask Tarantino what made Robbie right for the role, he tells me, “Margot looks like Sharon Tate. . . . And she can convey Sharon’s innocence and purity—those qualities are integral to the story.”

Tarantino’s film is about the end of Hollywood’s Golden Age, but Robbie, who is 28, has come to represent so much of what’s new. As an Australian soap actress, she entered Hollywood being typecast. She played the bronzed, gold-digging beauty in Martin Scorsese’s The Wolf of Wall Street, the hot blonde explaining mortgage bonds from a bubble bath in 2015’s The Big Short, and Jane following Alexander Skarsgård’s Tarzan into the Congo. But it turned out Robbie wanted more than these roles. It turned out she wanted to put on a fat suit for I, Tonya and to cover her face in boils for Mary Queen of Scots and to produce female-driven projects via her production company, LuckyChap Entertainment. Part of the charm in Robbie’s Tarantino story is that it—like the film itself—sounds very old Hollywood: An aspiring actress writes a fan letter to an auteur director in hopes of getting cast in one of his nostalgia-loving films. But Hollywood is changing, and while Robbie may have arrived at the end of an era, she is now among the women ushering in a new one.

Today we’re on the set of Birds of Prey, a spin-off of 2016’s Suicide Squad that Robbie developed and pitched to Warner Bros. as an R-rated, female-led superhero action film—a commercialized product of new Hollywood if ever there was one. “I think there’s a perception that a PG female-led action film is kind of considered a chick flick,” says Robbie.

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W MAGAZINE – Margot Robbie and Michael B. Jordan seem to effortlessly check all the movie star boxes: Megawatt charm? Check (those smiles!). Actor clout? No problem (having Martin Scorsese and Ryan Coogler launch their respective careers can’t hurt). Lucrative blockbuster movie franchises? Yep, that too (Robbie in Suicide Squad and Jordan in Creed, with a memorable detour into Wakanda). So, as it turns out, they have a lot to talk about—and not just about fame and their good fortune. Here, as part of our annual Best Performances portfolio, Robbie, who starred in the recent palace-intrigue period drama Mary Queen of Scots, and Jordan, who returned in Creed 2 and dominated the screen in Black Panther this year, sit down with W’s Editor at Large Lynn Hirschberg to share not only how it is they make morally questionable villains like Harley Quinn and Killmonger into magnetic antiheroes, but also their totally embarrassing early email addresses, their most memorable red carpet fashion faux pas, and their frankly amazing first kiss stories.

So Michael, what’s the first album you ever bought?

Michael B. Jordan: First album? Ah, man, that’s a good one.
Margot Robbie: Oh, that is a good one.
Jordan: I want to say, on cassette tape… um, Usher’s My Way.
Robbie: That’s a good answer.
Jordan: You’re taking me back. I want to say I rode my bike to the music store that was, like, down the street.

What was the first album you ever bought, Margot?

Robbie: I think the first album I bought was, um, AFI’s Sing the Sorrow. I was in a bit of a heavy metal phase. But I think the first single I bought was Blink 182, “All the Small Things.”
Jordan: Okay. So the heavy metal. Are you still in that phase or did you pass that?
Robbie: Occasionally.
Jordan: Occasionally?
Robbie: Occasionally.

Have you ever gone through a heavy metal phase, Michael?

Jordan: I have not.
Robbie: [Laughs.]
Jordan: But electric guitar solos are my thing. Like, I love, the Ernie Isleys of the world, the “Who’s That Lady” solo is pretty incredible. [Michael Jackson’s] “Dirty Diana” is pretty good.

Do you play air guitar?

Jordan: Air guitar? All day. [Laughs.]
Robbie: I can air guitar. That’s about the extent of my musical prowess, really.

Michael, did you box before Creed?

Jordan: I never officially boxed but karate, martial arts, and stuff like that. And then I kinda segued into boxing.

And you, Margot, have you ever boxed?

Robbie: I’ve done a bit of boxing, yeah—mainly to prepare for fight training, like stunt work. And I really, really like it. I have stupidly long arms, like, they’re too long for my body. So actually it’s kind of good when you’re boxing.
Jordan: The reach is incredible.
Robbie: An extra long reach. And it looks good on camera. Having long limbs on camera makes your punches—
Jordan: Your punch is a little wider, yeah, yeah, yeah. She knows what she’s talking about.

THE NEW YORK TIMES – When Josie Rourke made her pitch to direct “Mary Queen of Scots,” about the royal rivalry between the Scottish ruler Mary Stuart and the English Queen Elizabeth I, she suggested thinking of the movie as a renaissance version of “Heat.” Like that thriller, which cast Al Pacino and Robert De Niro on opposite sides of the law, “what the film needed was a really great scene for two women to play opposite each other,” Rourke said.

Much of “Mary Queen of Scots” (due Friday) builds to that moment when Mary and Elizabeth finally meet — a cinematic flourish, as historians believe the two communicated only by letter. The film’s scene is the sort of centerpiece that only works if you know the women playing it are formidably matched equals offscreen, too. In casting Margot Robbie as Elizabeth opposite Saoirse Ronan’s Mary, Rourke found a pair so well-matched that they even competed against each other for last season’s best actress Oscar.

Ronan was nominated then for “Lady Bird,” a coming-of-age tale that signaled the 24-year-old actress’s interest in playing complicated young women, while Robbie was in the mix for her performance in “I, Tonya” as the disgraced figure skater Tonya Harding, proving the 28-year-old actress could play roles quite unlike her breakout bombshell in “The Wolf of Wall Street.” The two women sit atop Hollywood’s young A-list, but Ronan and Robbie both bristle at traditional notions of how an actress — or, for that matter, a queen — is expected to wield that power.

USA TODAY – Margot Robbie is being royally honest.

The star of “Mary Queen of Scots” (in theaters Friday in New York and Los Angeles, expands to additional cities Dec. 21) wasn’t simply in the market for a juicy part when she signed on to play Queen Elizabeth I opposite Saoirse Ronan, who takes on the romantic (and doomed) Scottish monarch.

She was trying to add to her girl gang.

“I love all the dudes I’ve worked with, they’re amazing. (But) in real life I hang out with my girlfriends all the time,” says Robbie, 28. “I have a girl gang in New York, a girl gang in London, a girl gang in Australia. That’s who I hang out with. I have a lot of guy friends, too, but there’s nothing quite like the girl gang. And I was like, I never get to act with girls onscreen.”

The dueling queen drama was thus coronated. “Mary Queen of Scots” examines the fraught relationship between the dueling Scottish royal and her English cousin during their 16th-century reigns. The younger Mary, who herself had reasonable claim to the English throne, married and produced a male heir, posing a two-pronged threat to Elizabeth’s reign. She was also a Catholic slandered by claims of sexual promiscuity and forced to flee Scotland.

LOS ANGELES TIMES – From the moment she became queen of Scotland at 6 days old, the world never stopped scrutinizing Mary Stuart’s every move — or pitting her against Elizabeth I of England, the cousin whose throne she held a claim to by birth.

Executed at the age of 44, implicated in a plot to assassinate Elizabeth that historians debate to this day, it was her enemies who would write Mary’s legacy. So in the turbulent years of her controversial life, contemporaries wonder, who was the real woman known as Mary, Queen of Scots, and what led to her tragic undoing?

Put another way in director Josie Rourke’s forceful new biopic, “Mary Queen of Scots”: What if Mary and Elizabeth could’ve just sat down together and worked things out?

It’s a notion that occurred to Rourke, star Saoirse Ronan (“Lady Bird”), who plays the titular Scottish queen, and Margot Robbie (“I, Tonya”), who plays Mary’s cousin and political frenemy Queen Elizabeth I.

“You don’t know how many times I thought, ‘If they just called out for coffee at the beginning of this movie … it would have been so different!’” said Robbie with a laugh, reuniting in Los Angeles with Rourke and Ronan for the first time since filming the period drama.

Cheekily, Ronan agreed. “Let’s just go to Starbucks,” she added, channeling Mary, Queen of Scots, by way of a flawless Valley girl accent. “Have a blueberry muffin, sort this … out …”

Filmed on location 430 years after Mary’s grisly execution, “Mary Queen of Scots” brings the monarch’s story to life with a distinctly feminist aim, focusing on the defining years of the charismatic young Catholic queen with a fierce Ronan in the lead role.

Backed by the producers of the Oscar-winning “Elizabeth” and “Elizabeth: The Golden Age,” which starred Cate Blanchett, and scripted by “House of Cards” creator Beau Willimon, the Working Title and Focus Features film is part political thriller, part chamber drama. It marks the film directing debut of theater veteran Rourke, who also serves as the artistic director of London’s Donmar Warehouse theater.

In its humanistic portrait of the two women, the film suggests that the headstrong Mary and the fearful Elizabeth might have bolstered each other and even found solace in their shared challenges had politics, religion and male advisors on both sides not kept them at odds.

Margot is featured in the December/January issue of Harper’s Bazaar. We have added beautiful outtakes from the issue along with the cover to the gallery! We will add scans as soon as we get the issue! Enjoy!

HARPER’S BAZAAR – There were days when Margot Robbie would walk out of the makeup trailer on the set of her new film, Mary Queen of Scots, and castmates couldn’t bear to look at her. I’d say, ‘Hey, how’s your weekend?’ ” says the 28-year-old actress, in her best exaggeration of her native Australian Gold Coast accent. “But they wouldn’t even get close to me. It was very alienating. And I felt very lonely. It was an interesting social experiment.”

Her transformation into Queen Elizabeth I, who was scarred by smallpox as a young woman, took three and a half hours of intensive hair and makeup every day. “They’d start with a head wrap,” says Robbie. “Gelling and pinning my hair down. Then we’d do a bald cap.” There were different wigs for different stages of the story and her illness, one that was very thinning, and prosthetic scarring applied to her face. “Surprisingly, the quick part was the white makeup,” she says. “And the heavily drawn-on blush, eyebrows, lips.”

Such a transformation was no small feat, considering that the actress got her big-screen break playing a character described as “the hottest blonde ever” in Martin Scorsese’s 2013 drama, The Wolf of Wall Street. But Robbie, who currently serves as a face of Chanel, refused early on to be typecast by her beauty. “When I was trying to make my name as an actress, creative roles for women were limited,” she says of her decision to form her own production company, LuckyChap Entertainment, in 2014. “I didn’t want to pick up another script where I was the wife or the girlfriend— just a catalyst for the male story line. It was uninspiring.”

Interestingly, Mary Queen of Scots isn’t the first time Robbie has taken on a role that required her to actively make herself look worse on-screen. After all, who can forget the curled bangs, black eyeliner, and braces she donned to play disgraced figure skater Tonya Harding in I, Tonya? “Margot is a very, very good actor who takes her work incredibly seriously,” says costar Saoirse Ronan, who plays Queen Mary in the film. “I don’t think looks even factor into it. Even when she has a glamorous role, she’s got this brilliant, strong presence, and part of that is because she’s a very sincere and authentic person. She’s very open. What you see is what you get.” (Read the rest of the interview at the source)

ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY – The first time Saoirse Ronan and Margot Robbie saw each other on the set of Mary Queen of Scots, they ended up on the floor, crying in each other’s arms.

It was Ronan’s first day as the titular royal, and Robbie’s last as her cousin and rival, Elizabeth I. The two actresses had been kept apart throughout rehearsals and production until then; Robbie filmed in England, Ronan would be shooting in Scotland, and at their request, they never crossed paths in character prior to their sole scene together. “We really, really didn’t want to see each other,” Ronan says. “I love Margot and wanted to hang out, but we wanted [the meeting] to be this special thing.”

Yet, when the time finally came for them to perform the queens’ confrontation, well… “We were blubbering like idiots,” Ronan tells EW. “We just held each other for ages, we wouldn’t let go. We were like” — she lowers her voice to demonstrate their sobbing — “‘Huohooouuughh.’” She laughs. “I’ve never experienced anything like that.”

Then again, her real-life counterpart never did either. Historians believe the Queen of Scots and the Virgin Queen never met, but theater director-turned-first-time film helmer Josie Rourke was inspired by the 19th-century Friedrich Schiller play Mary Stuart, in which Mary and Elizabeth talk face-to-face on stage. “The whole conception of the film for me was around that meeting,” Rourke says of the historical drama. “We really wanted to have our version of that famous scene, with these two women looking at each other and being confronted with their choices — their personal choices, their political choices. It’s a moment that’s deeply personal.”

And deeply emotional. The waterworks on set may have been caused by the high stakes (and excitement) of capturing the only time the stars share the screen, but Robbie thinks those tears also stemmed from how much they’d delved into the tragedy of their characters’ histories. (For Elizabeth: Her mother was beheaded by her father. For Mary: She lost her husband before she turned 18. And both were often targeted by religious groups, political conspirators, and marriage treaties.) “I had underestimated how difficult their lives were, and how much pain was wrapped up in this power,” Robbie says. “I think it just meant more.”

THE EVENING STANDARD – Margot Robbie has revealed details of her hen party – and how her love of the Harry Potter novels gave the bash an unusual twist.

The Australian star, who was nominated for an Oscar last year for I, Tonya, married British assistant director Tom Ackerley in December 2016.

Her hen do was held at a friend’s house in Australia, with 45 guests including old schoolmates who were nicknamed “The Heckers”, friends from her days in Neighbours, and former Clapham housemates — made up of the crew from her movie Suite Française.

Her husband, whom she met on that set, also lived in the houseshare. She told ES Magazine: “There are 16 of us [in The Heckers], we have been called that since we were at school.

“[The Clapham crowd] are a rowdy bunch, too, and the combination was explosive. They hired a Harry Potter-themed stripper for me; he had all the Harry Potter phrases and innuendoes. I was so touched, it was really such a thoughtful thing to do. They know me so well.”

Robbie, 28, whose latest movie is the noir thriller Terminal, also told how she turns to J K Rowling’s books to help her sleep at night and has been reading them on a loop since she was eight.

“Right now I am on the fifth book. I know what’s coming next when I turn the page,” she said. “I can’t meditate and this is what I have to do to fall asleep. Vaughn [Stein, the director of Terminal] told me that if you have trouble sleeping, which I do, you should read something you’re familiar with to calm you.

“If I read something new before I go to bed, my brain goes 1,000 miles an a hour. Reading Harry Potter makes me happy and calms me. I read for about an hour to two hours every night. My husband hates it.”

Robbie fought for her first role, in Neighbours, and said she had to make it on her own as it wasn’t an obvious career growing up in Gold Coast.

“No one thought I’d be an actress because where I grew up it wasn’t a job you could do. I never met anyone who’d so much as made a cup of coffee on a film set.”

During her time playing Donna Freedman on Neighbours she studied with a voice coach to perfect her American accent and try to make her way in Hollywood. Roles in The Wolf Of Wall Street and Suicide Squad followed.

Robbie, who will play Elizabeth I in film Mary Queen of Scots, has backed the #MeToo movement. She said: “Of course I knew the problem existed. I just hadn’t viewed it as a problem we were allowed to be angry about.

“Because no one spoke about it, no one said, ‘I am not putting up with this any more.’ It wasn’t called a problem, it was called a fact of life. That is such a terrible mindset. If we just accept things like sexual harassment as a fact of life, it doesn’t get fixed.” (source)