Margot Robbie wasn’t a Barbie fanatic as a child. She’s not even sure she owned a Barbie. “I don’t think I did,” she tells me one morning over breakfast in Venice Beach. “I know my cousin had a bunch of Barbies, and I’d go to her house.” Growing up on Australia’s Gold Coast, Robbie spent a lot of time outside. She and her cousin would make mud pies. They’d play with trucks. And they’d play with Barbies. Mostly they’d build forts, “cubbies” to an Australian. “Building cubbies was what we did all day, every day.”
We are a couple of blocks from the Venice boardwalk, at Great White, an Australian-owned restaurant, and I have asked Robbie what compelled her to produce and star in a live-action Barbie movie, due out this July. “It wasn’t that I ever wanted to play Barbie, or dreamt of being Barbie, or anything like that,” the 32-year-old actor says. “This is going to sound stupid, but I really didn’t even think about playing Barbie until years into developing the project.”
It doesn’t sound stupid but it does seem counterintuitive, the notion that Robbie, whose breakout role in The Wolf of Wall Street was described in that movie’s script as “the hottest blonde ever,” was not envisioning herself in the role of Barbie when she sought the film rights from Mattel. And yet the person sitting across the table is not giving blonde bombshell. Not in a conventional sense, anyway.
Robbie is dressed in a vintage long-sleeve Harley-Davidson T-shirt and a short body-con onesie, the sort of thing a teenage wrestler might wear to practice. “Makes me look like a giant baby,” she says of the onesie at one point. (It does nothing of the sort.) On her feet are New Balance sneakers and striped gym socks she recently bought in Japan, which say “Are you city boy?” around the ankles. Her hair is pulled back in double French braids, displaying dangly gold mermaid earrings she got in Ibiza. Although she is impossibly beautiful, Robbie’s aura is sprite-like and a little feral. It’s easy to imagine she just wandered away from a traveling circus.
A certain beachy physicality was evident out of the gate. For this interview, Robbie wanted to go Rollerblading. I assumed this meant we would rent Rollerblades. Turns out Robbie has her own, and that she thought I might too. (I don’t.) Robbie then offered to lend me her pair, because she also owns old-school skates. (Later, when I put on her Rollerblades, I discover that they have no brakes. “Wait, where are the brakes?” I ask. “Ohhhhhhhh,” she says, letting out a throaty laugh. “I forgot. I took the brakes off because I hate to brake.”)
The plan was locked down. After breakfast we would go skating on the boardwalk, then walk to Robbie’s favorite ice cream shop, Salt & Straw. Robbie had to leave at 2 p.m. sharp, I was warned. She had a 3 p.m. meeting with the writer of Cocaine Bear, Jimmy Warden, whose directorial debut her company LuckyChap is co-producing. That last combination of details begins to convey the general vibe of the actual Margot Robbie: She’ll arrive with an assortment of brake-less skates, and she’ll have a hard out at two.
Between bites of avocado toast, grilled Halloumi cheese, and Australian-style bacon—“Crisp it up,” she tells the waiter—Robbie delivers the Barbie backstory with Glengarry Glen Ross–esque speed. There were previous attempts to make a Barbie movie. Amy Schumer was attached at one point. So was Anne Hathaway. Those projects never got off the ground. Robbie kept tabs on the status. As a producer, she saw huge potential in the Barbie IP. “The word itself is more globally recognized than practically everything else other than Coca-Cola.”
In 2018, Robbie sensed an opening. So she had a meeting with the new CEO of Mattel, Ynon Kreiz, at the Polo Lounge. That meeting was about pitching LuckyChap, the production outfit she runs with her friend Josey McNamara and her husband, Tom Ackerley, to Mattel. “We’re LuckyChap,” she says. “This is our company. This is what we do. This is what we stand for. This is why we should be the ones to make a Barbie movie. And this is how we’d go about it.”
LuckyChap didn’t have a specific concept in mind, but they did know this much. “We of course would want to honor the 60-year legacy that this brand has,” Robbie says. “But we have to acknowledge that there are a lot of people who aren’t fans of Barbie. And in fact, aren’t just indifferent to Barbie. They actively hate Barbie. And have a real issue with Barbie. We need to find a way to acknowledge that.”
There were bigger meetings with Mattel, and then meetings with Warner Bros., where LuckyChap had a first-look deal at the time. Eventually Robbie started talking to Greta Gerwig about writing and directing. “I was very scared it was going to be a no,” Robbie says. “At the time this was such a terrifying thing to take on. People were like, You’re going to do what?” But Gerwig said yes, on the condition that she could write the script with her partner, Noah Baumbach. “It felt sparky to me in some way that felt kind of promising,” Gerwig tells me later. “I was the one who said, Noah and I will do this.” (Baumbach: “She broke the news to me after we were already doing it.”)
LuckyChap wanted Gerwig and Baumbach to have full creative freedom. “At the same time,” Robbie says, “we’ve got two very nervous ginormous companies, Warner Bros. and Mattel, being like: What’s their plan? What are they going to do? What’s it gonna be about? What’s she going to say? They have a bazillion questions.” In the end LuckyChap found a way to structure a deal so that Gerwig and Baumbach would be left alone to write what they wanted, “which was really fucking hard to do.”
Gerwig and Baumbach did share a treatment, Robbie adds: “Greta wrote an abstract poem about Barbie. And when I say ‘abstract,’ I mean it was super abstract.” (Gerwig declines to read me the poem but offers that it “shares some similarities with the Apostles’ Creed.”) No one at LuckyChap, Mattel, or Warner Bros. saw any pages of the script until it was finished.
When I ask Gerwig and Baumbach to describe their Barbie writing process, the words “open” and “free” get used a lot. The project seemed “wide open,” Gerwig tells me. “There really was this kind of open, free road that we could keep building,” Baumbach says. Part of it had to do with the fact that their characters were dolls. “It’s like you’re playing with dolls when you’re writing something, and in this case, of course, there was this extra layer in that they were dolls,” Baumbach says. “It was literally imaginative play,” Gerwig says. That they were writing the script during lockdown also mattered, Baumbach says. “We were in the pandemic, and everybody had the feeling of, Who knows what the world is going to look like. That fueled it as well. That feeling of: Well, here goes nothing.”
Robbie and Ackerley read the Barbie script at the same time. A certain joke on page one sent their jaws to the floor. “We just looked at each other, pure panic on our faces,” Robbie recalls. “We were like, Holy fucking shit.” When Robbie finished reading: “I think the first thing I said to Tom was, This is so genius. It is such a shame that we’re never going to be able to make this movie.”
