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

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.

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)

DEADLINE – EXCLUSIVE: Warner Bros and DC Entertainment have chosen Cathy Yan to be the director of an untitled girl gang movie, likely the next superhero film to be graced by Suicide Squad scene-stealer Harley Quinn, in the form of Margot Robbie. A deal has to be completed, but it is expected that Yan will become the second female filmmaker to join the DC club after Wonder Woman‘s Patty Jenkins, and the first female Asian director ever tapped to direct a superhero film.

This is a bold bet for Warner Bros’ Geoff Johns and Walter Hamada, who oversee DC under Toby Emmerich. Yan got the job over numerous well established male directors, and because she is taking this giant leap with just one small-budget indie movie under her belt. That would be Dead Pigs, a film that won the World Cinema Dramatic Award For Ensemble Acting at Sundance last January. Despite being a new talent, Yan’s presentation for Birds of Prey was exceptional, and Robbie held firm to her desire for this film to be directed by a woman.

Robbie’s LuckyChap is producing with Sue Kroll and her Kroll & Co Entertainment and Bryan Unkeless of Clubhouse Pictures. Robbie and Unkeless produced I, Tonya.

The project is based on Birds of Prey, which in the DC universe teams Quinn with several other crime fighters, namely Black Canary, Barbara Gordon (Batgirl) and Huntress. It is not confirmed if all of them will be characters in the film. What is clear is that both the main characters and most of the creative braintrust are female, remarkable for a studio-sized superhero film. The script was written by Christina Hodson, who wrote the Transformers spinoff Bumblebee, and just got hired to write the Batgirl movie.

This film looks cleared to start production by year’s end or early next year, after Robbie completes Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. She is negotiating to star alongside Leonardo DiCaprio and Brad Pitt in the Quentin Tarantino-directed film for Sony Pictures. The other Harley Quinn films are still under construction. That includes the Suicide Squad sequel to be directed by Gavin O’Connor. Two others, Harley Quinn Vs The Joker and Gotham City Sirens with Suicide Squad helmer David Ayer, seem further in the distance.

Back to Yan. She was a Wall Street Journal reporter who worked from New York, Hong Kong and Beijing, and one of the paper’s youngest reporters to land multiple stories on the front page. She wrote and directed numerous short films before stepping up to features with Dead Pigs.

In that film, a mysterious stream of pig carcasses floats silently toward China’s populous economic hub, Shanghai. As authorities struggle to explain the phenomenon, characters intersect. They include a down-and-out pig farmer with a youthful heart struggles to make ends meet, an upwardly mobile landowner fighting gentrification against an American expat seeking a piece of the Chinese dream, a romantic busboy hides his job from his father, and a rich young woman struggling to find her independence.

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!

THE LOS ANGELES TIMES – It is an event that lives on in tabloid infamy: the tale of figure skaters Tonya Harding and Nancy Kerrigan and their battle to make it to the 1994 Winter Olympics. The new film “I, Tonya” reframes that story to fully spotlight Harding, transforming her from a media-made villain into someone far more human, fragile and tragic.

A title card at the beginning of the film declares that it is based on “irony free, wildly contradictory, totally true interviews” with Harding and her ex-husband, Jeff Gillooly. The portrait of Harding drawn by the film is one of sharp edges and hard landings, a woman with raw athletic abilities who couldn’t fit in with the refined image of the figure skating establishment.

Harding made some of her costumes herself and sometimes performed to music by ZZ Top. She also was the first American woman to land the extremely difficult and still-rare triple axel jump in competition. But the scandal that ensued after Kerrigan was attacked at the 1994 national figure skating championships left a long shadow over Harding’s reputation and legacy. Gillooly was implicated in planning the crime, and questions remain about Harding’s level of involvement.

Directed by Craig Gillespie from a screenplay by Steven Rogers, “I, Tonya” is a showcase for energetic, emotional performances by Margot Robbie as Harding, Sebastian Stan as Gillooly and Allison Janney as Harding’s mother, LaVona Golden.

Australian-born Robbie, best-known for her breakthrough role in “The Wolf of Wall Street” and more recently as Harley Quinn in “Suicide Squad,” had never heard the Harding saga when the script first came through her production company, LuckyChap Entertainment. (Robbie is also a producer on the film.) She was immediately struck by the rowdy energy of the storytelling and the complicated depiction of Harding.

“It was a character that scared me but also intrigued me,” said Robbie, who would go on to some five months of figure skating training for the part.

DEADLINE – It has been a dizzying ascent for Margot Robbie, from the Australian soap opera Neighbours to Hollywood, with roles in the TV series Pan Am and in Martin Scorsese’s The Wolf of Wall Street. But she truly announces herself as an actress with chops, and a chance to medal this awards season, with I, Tonya. In the Craig Gillespie-directed film, Robbie soars as the scandal-scarred US Olympic figure skater Tonya Harding. She turns an historically vilified white trash tabloid figure into a defiant underdog antihero, who threw up a finger to skating judges when they ignored her superior physical skills and resisted Harding as the image of their sport.

Pushed as a child by a hard-edged mother as stingy with praise as she was generous with open-hand slaps (played hilariously by Allison Janney), Harding’s story previously belonged to the gossip hounds in the tabloids. Despite winning the 1991 US Championships when she became the first woman to successfully execute the gravity-defying triple axel, Harding’s place in sports history is one of ignominy because of her suspected complicity in the clumsy attempt by her abusive husband Jeff Gillooly (played by Sebastian Stan) to hobble her elegant rival Nancy Kerrigan before the 1994 Winter Olympics. Harding received a lifetime ban by the US Figure Skating Association, after pleading guilty to a charge of hindering the prosecution in the attack on Kerrigan.

Despite the string of roles that have followed Wolf—such as her turn as Harley Quinn, the bright spot of Suicide Squad, which she will reprise in sequels—I, Tonya is the first film to rest solely on Robbie’s shoulders. She plunges into the portrayal of an unglamorous, dirt-poor and defiant woman, who sewed her own costumes and applied her own makeup (harshly) for the sport she believed in. And Robbie captures the frightful intensity—and the ultimate tragedy—of the character she plays. It’s this kind of expert understanding of character that may have prompted Quentin Tarantino to pursue Robbie for the role of Sharon Tate in his next film, and it puts her squarely into the Oscar conversation this year.

Gold may have eluded Tonya Harding on the ice, but she may have one more shot on Oscar night.

(Read the rest of the interview at the source!)

In the gallery you can find an outtake from the Deadline Contenders portraits session, and digital scans from Deadline Oscar Preview: Actresses Issue! Enjoy 🙂

Margot is featured in the November issue of W Magazine, with an amazing new editorial and a brand new interview. Check the photos in our gallery and read part of the interview below (and find the rest at the source!)

W MAGAZINE – When Margot Robbie read the script for I, Tonya, a biopic of the notorious ice skater Tonya Harding, she assumed the story was complete fiction. “I thought the writer was so quirky and crazy to come up with this stuff,” she told me, still looking a bit astonished by the strange twists in Harding’s life. (In 1994, the skater was famously implicated in a plot to take down her nemesis Nancy Kerrigan after a man attacked Kerrigan with a baton.) We were on location for the W shoot in Snug Harbor, a bucolic Staten Island enclave founded in the early 1800s as a haven for old sailors. There was something appealingly run-down and shabby about the setting, but Robbie, who is 27, is a glow-y girl: With blond hair and an engaged manner, she can’t help but shine.

Which is why it is so remarkable that Robbie was able to completely disappear into Harding’s decidedly darker persona. A self-described redneck from Oregon, Harding was the antithesis of the traditional superstar figure skater. She was rough and flashy, and her skating was powerful and athletic rather than graceful and balletic. Harding’s ex-husband, Jeff Gillooly, and her bodyguard, Shawn Eckardt, were ultimately charged with criminal conspiracy to commit assault. While Kerrigan recovered from her injuries in time to compete in the ’94 Olympics, the incident propelled Harding to tabloid infamy and effectively ended her skating career.

“I was 4 years old and living in Australia at the time,” Robbie said. “The news did reach Australia, but I didn’t know about it.”
Riveted by the script, Robbie immediately agreed to star in and produce the film—despite that fact that she had never figure skated in her life. “I did four months of training, five days a week, four hours a day,” she recalled. “On Christmas Eve, I was at the rink. And now I actually really miss it. I kept my ice skates—but I said goodbye to a whole world of pain that I didn’t realize came along with figure skating.”

Not only did Robbie have to be believable on the ice, she also had to take on the even more difficult challenge of assuming Harding’s accent and physique. “Once I put on the wig, which altered my hairline, and bleached my eyebrows, I started to see Tonya,” Robbie said. “The hardest part was losing my natural laugh. It needed to be Tonya’s laugh. I couldn’t do a triple axel like Tonya, but I was able to master her laugh.”

Read the rest of the story/interview at the source