Profile: Margot Robbie
A wildly attractive new star from Down Under
It must not have been easy for a woman to hold her head up high when surrounded by the high-testosterone profanity parade of Martin Scorsese’s The Wolf of Wall Street, a tale of lowlife stockbrokers from Long Island who strike it rich and then implode, led by Leonardo DiCaprio as the real-life Jordan Belfort. But Margot Robbie—who was cast as Jordan’s va-va-va-voom second wife, Naomi, with few credits on her résumé besides the short-lived ABC series Pan Am after having arrived stateside from her native Australia—more than held her own. Indeed: she ruled. The genetically blessed 26-year-old actress conquered Naomi’s Brooklyn accent, overcame whatever qualms she may have had about appearing naked, and dominated every square inch of every screen that dared to frame her. Watch her in action:
She grew up in a small town on the Pacific Gold Coast of Queensland, but Robbie was no country bumpkin. “I remember watching American movies and TV shows growing up and thinking, Oh, God, these crazy characters doing these outlandish things, how do the writers come up with it?,” she told Vanity Fair. “Then I moved to America and met so many people just like the people in the movies, and I realized, Oh, so this is just real life in America.” She’s been very busy since Wolf of Wall Street became a critical and box office hit in 2013, playing a war reporter in Tina Fey’s Whiskey Tango Foxtrot and as a con artist opposite Will Smith in Focus.
But the summer of 2016 has become the season of Margot Robbie. She got to play Jane in the big-budget The Legend of Tarzan, opposite Alexander Skarsgård, and now, opening in theaters August 5, she’ll star as Harley Quinn in Suicide Squad, a nasty comic-book adventure movie in which a group of villains are harnessed to accomplish good deeds. “She loves causing mayhem and destruction,” Robbie says of her character, a former gymnast who is at the center of the film. Among the other bad guys involved are Jared Leto as the Joker, Harley’s paramour; Will Smith as Deadshot; and Cara Delevingne as Enchantress. In the movie, Robbie looks to be a knockout, in all senses of the word:
Robbie has already formed her own production company, and has finished shooting a thriller about international assassins, called Terminal. She’s hoping to do a version of the Tonya Harding story, playing the renegade Olympic skating hopeful. Perhaps it’s difficult for someone like her to play anything but tricksters and contenders, but whatever project she chooses, PROVOKR is sure there will be no shortage of people interested in watching her.
