Margot Robbie came racing into the tucked-away bungalow she was renting here. She had returned from recording the voice of a talking dingo for a DreamWorks animated movie, and on an April afternoon was doing her best to clean up strewn clothes from overstuffed suitcases — evidence that an intended one-week visit to Los Angeles had stretched into a month.
“I’m sorry it’s so manic,” said this 25-year-old actress, who was born in Gold Coast, Australia, and lives in London, yet had not seen either city in a very long time.
“I’m always like, ‘No, it will calm down next week,’” she said in a more relaxed moment, stretched across a patio couch next to a faded pillow that said “God Save the Queen.”
“And then the following week ends up being crazier.”
Ms. Robbie was on the latest leg of the globe-trotting journey that has consumed her since 2013. It began at roughly the moment that a worldwide audience discovered her in Martin Scorsese’s “The Wolf of Wall Street,” playing the no-nonsense lover-turned-wife of an unscrupulous broker played by Leonardo DiCaprio.
After three years of relentless film work, she is poised for two of her most prominent roles this summer, in franchise movies whose success could transform her from a wannabe to a deserves-to-be star.
First, she’ll be seen as a self-reliant and decidedly un-dainty Jane in “The Legend of Tarzan,” a new adventure of that jungle hero opening July 1. Then, on Aug. 5, she stars in “Suicide Squad,” based on the DC Comics series, as Harley Quinn, a cracked-up criminal psychologist who wields a baseball bat and a Brooklyn accent with equal ferocity.
These prospects would sound like an actor’s dreams come true, yet they have prompted Ms. Robbie to wonder if they are indeed the fulfillment of her aspirations. Continue reading
