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)

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)

THE ENVELOPE – “I, Tonya,” the Craig Gillespie-directed biopic about Tonya Harding, the figure skater banned from competition for life for her connection to a 1994 attack on fellow skater Nancy Kerrigan, has brought its stars — Margot Robbie, who plays an unsinkable Harding, and Allison Janney, as her sharp-tongued mother, LaVona — Oscar nominations, critical acclaim and, not surprisingly, a newfound love for the Winter Olympics. “We’re watching men’s half-pipe,” reports Robbie, jet-lagged and talking via speakerphone while sitting alongside Janney in a London hotel room. “We’re just mesmerized.”

The pair were in town to attend the BAFTAs, where they were both nominees. Before heading off to a party, they took time out to talk about the film’s more nuanced examination of Harding’s life (domestic violence, the skating world’s contempt for her working-class roots), Janney’s annoying parakeet costar and the reaction Robbie, an “I, Tonya” producer, had during her initial reading of Steven Rogers’ script.

“It’s so easy to dismiss these characters and their feelings. But by the end of it, I was devastated, angry and frustrated for them. I’d laugh out loud at something, then immediately feel disgusted with myself that I found it funny,” says Robbie. “To be able to let those feelings creep up on you, instead of being told to feel them? That’s a real art form.”

Margot is featured on the cover of the February issue of Elle. Outtakes have now been added to the gallery. Stay tunes for HQ scans!

ELLE – Margot Robbie is, yes, a knockout. But like the women she’s portrayed in her decade-long career—a trophy wife on a mission in The Wolf of Wall Street; a balls-to-the-wall war reporter in Whiskey Tango Foxtrot; the feisty, feminist Jane in The Legend of Tarzan; and, of course, Suicide Squad’s lovable lunatic criminal, Harley Quinn—the Aussie stunner is so much more than an ingenue. Below, find a preview of Robbie’s February cover interview with her I, Tonya co-star, Allison Janney, where she discusses her future as a director, the highlight of her career and what it was like playing Tonya Harding:

On fear of playing a real-life character: “…playing Tonya [Harding], who’s very much alive and is widely documented, can be more intimidating.”

On directing: “I still love acting. But I’ve spent the last 10 years on a film set, and I realized that if I am pouring my heart and soul into a film, I want to be one of those voices in the conversation making decisions.”

On the first highlight of her career: “When I got to New York for the first time, I took my first paycheck, walked straight into Tiffany’s on Fifth Avenue, and bought an airplane charm that goes on my bracelet. It was the best feeling ever. I got my little blue box, and I got it for myself.”

On which skill she wants to master: “I recently bought fire-twirling poles, because I really want to get good at it. When I was backpacking in the Philippines, there were heaps of fire twirlers on the beach, and it was so cool. I was like, Wow, I really want to do that!”

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!

TIME OUT NEW YORK – Stamina, flair, toughness: Anyone who tells you acting isn’t a lot like playing sports hasn’t spent much time doing either. Ever since holding her own against a manic Leonardo DiCaprio in The Wolf of Wall Street, Margot Robbie could never be confused for anything less than a fearless competitor. But her latest performance seriously ups the ante: As the disgraced Olympic figure skater Tonya Harding—forever tarnished by her association with the 1994 off-ice attack on Nancy Kerrigan—the 27-year-old actor pulls off one of the most daring feats of empathy of the year. Directed by Craig Gillespie and coproduced by Robbie herself, I, Tonya is a supercharged Scorsesian rise-and-fall sports movie: trashy, funny, devastating and anchored by a star turn that will be talked about long beyond awards season. Born in Australia before living in Brooklyn, London and most recently Los Angeles, Robbie calls herself a gypsy; “home” is a free-floating concept for her. During a relatively quiet moment before the Oscar whirlwind, we connected with Robbie to talk about lacing up for 17-hour shooting days, the Harvey Weinstein scandal and the enigma at the heart of her latest triumph.

Do you miss living in New York?
Oh, my God, are you kidding me? I miss New York all the time. I was in South Williamsburg just before it really blew up, and then I lived in Bed-Stuy for a little bit as well. It was amazing. I think Williamsburg is a little too busy for me now. But six, seven years ago, it was incredible. I miss everything: the restaurants, Brooklyn Bowl, Nitehawk Cinema—I used to go there all the time.

But you’re still a huge New York Rangers fan?
Definitely. I think I’ll always be a Rangers fan.

You played ice hockey growing up, right?
Not growing up, but I played it when I first moved to America [in 2011]. I’m from a coastal town in Australia, so ice sports weren’t really a thing. But The Mighty Ducks was, so I wanted to join a league. I loved it.

What position did you play?
Right wing, but don’t be fooled—I am not any good at it.

Still, the skating must have helped you nail all those triple axels in I, Tonya.
[Sarcastically] Yeah, I can totally do a triple axel. We all underestimated how incredibly difficult that was. When we started planning that scene, we thought, Oh, we’ll just get a stunt double to come in. And our skate choreographer was like, “No one can do a triple axel—you know that, right?” There were only two women in America who could do them, and they’re both Asian, so neither could double for me. We ended up having to CGI it.

I’m crushed. Meanwhile, I love how the movie stresses Harding’s real talents, along with her scrappiness.
She wasn’t one to play by the rules—she was a little rough around the edges—and without that sort of rule-breaking mentality, she wouldn’t have been able to pull off such an amazing sporting achievement: the first U.S. woman to land a triple axel in a competition. The more we got to understand the ice-skating world, the more we appreciated that.

There’s also a subtle class warfare going on here with the other girls and against snobby judges who were shocked by skating routines set to ZZ Top’s “Sleeping Bag.”
She had incredible discipline and drive to make it to where she was, despite her class and her circumstances. Figure skating’s a really expensive sport. Still, she excelled. Tonya’s not necessarily the image they wanted to have. But I think that’s what I like about the film most.

All we mainly remember about Harding is the “incident.” How does one play that mentality? The film is oblique on her culpability.
I think what I was focusing on, overall, was the idea that she was craving love and constantly searching for validation, whether that was from Jeff [Gillooly, Harding’s then husband] or her mom or the public.

You don’t seem to want to judge her.
This story really kicked off the 24-hour news cycle. It was right before O.J. It snowballed out of control. People were feeding off it so much. As she says in the movie, “You’re all my attackers, too.” We can sit there and judge her mom or Jeff for abusing her, but we so quickly judge Tonya as well. The general public played a part in that. At some point in the film, we want to hold a mirror up to society and give us a chance to look at ourselves and question how quickly we judge people without knowing their circumstances.

Also, a beautiful photoshoot comes together with the article!