10 years on from her explosive breakthrough in Martin Scorsese’s The Wolf of Wall Street, Margot Robbie has had the moment of her career with the release of Barbie, a project she shepherded to the screen as a producer long before she ever claimed the lead role. After more than a billion dollars at the box office, Barbie has entered the zeitgeist, and Robbie is ready to take a victorious breath, finds Joe Utichi.
Success takes many forms, but few moviestars can ever claim to find themselves where Margot Robbie has set up camp at the start of 2024. In the wake of the enormous triumph of Barbie, she has achieved the kind of household recognition that has proved elusive for so many actors of her generation. And while the film that brought her here is based upon one of the most storied intellectual properties on the planet, there are few who could argue that its outsized success relies solely on brand recognition alone.
Barbie, after all, didn’t just bring a familiar plastic doll to the big screen. In the hands of director Greta Gerwig, who also co-wrote with her partner Noah Baumbach, it sought to skate a knife’s edge between warm-hearted fan service and tongue-in-cheek corporate satire. It could have collapsed into itself, so delicate was that balance, and yet it managed to appeal as much to our nostalgia for the pink innocence of Barbieland as it did to our world-weary cynicism about everything we claim this conglomerated merchandise represents about our society.
The fact that the project began with Margot Robbie has earned her a right to a victory lap. Through her LuckyChap Productions banner, established nearly a decade ago, Robbie had been tracking the IP, waiting to see who might take a leap on a big-budget adaptation of it. When nobody did, she charged in to produce, alongside her partner Tom Ackerley (Robbie Brenner and David Heyman also produce).
Robbie envisioned Gal Gadot as the ultimate personification of the doll, and knew instantly, she claims, that Gerwig would the perfect custodian for it as director. One might imagine there are no mirrors at the Robbie residence, though, because she didn’t consider herself the right candidate to play the title role until Gadot passed and Gerwig insisted she wanted to write the script for Robbie. But if Gerwig felt like a leftfield choice to co-write and direct, the movie’s eventual casting of Robbie as Barbie and Ryan Gosling as Ken seemed like the most fated of choices. In the wake of its success, any other players are hard to envision.
Margot Robbie begins 2024 as one of the industry’s MVPs, a bankable movie star who has established a production company in LuckyChap that seeks not to create star vehicles for its principal, but rather to tell compelling stories. Among other successes, LuckyChap has produced both of Emerald Fennell’s features to date, including this year’s Saltburn, and more of its productions don’t star Robbie than do. The goal, she says, is to keep the company at the top of filmmakers’ call lists for any projects with female protagonists, or from women creators.
Indeed, after the zeitgeist impact of Barbie, Robbie’s last priority is to shepherd more projects that might bring her image back to theater lobbies and billboards anytime soon. “Everyone’s probably sick of the sight of me for now,” she laughs.
DEADLINE: You’ve had a charmed year with the release of Barbie, after many years developing it as a producer and then the star. December 25th marked the 10th anniversary of the release of The Wolf of Wall Street. Could you have predicted what this decade would bring?
MARGOT ROBBIE: Wow. I hadn’t thought of that, and I’d been thinking about giving it another watch. I really want to rewatch it, so maybe I’ll do a little 10-year reunion watch.
So much has happened in the past decade. People say, “Oh, it feels like just yesterday,” but it’s like, no, it feels like 10 years ago because so many things have happened. Next year will be 10 years since we started the production company, and there’ll be a bunch more 10-year milestones.
I feel there was a seismic shift in my life 10 years ago with The Wolf of Wall Street, and now, after everything with Barbie this year, it feels like this past decade has been wild, far beyond anything I could ever have dreamed for myself.
DEADLINE: Barbie has grossed more than $1.4 billion at the box office, but beyond the financials, it touched a real nerve and became the sort of zeitgeist, cultural success many speculated wasn’t possible anymore. Could you have foreseen that as you were developing it? Did the success come with a sense of relief for having got it across the line?
ROBBIE: It was the best-case scenario for how a film could turn out. But 90% of you has to be certain it’s going to work. That’s how I approach everything. When it comes to Promising Young Woman, for example — or really anything we work on — I think, “I believe in this so much that I know I’m right about it. I know I am, and I don’t understand why people are questioning that. Why can’t anyone else see it? Why is everyone looking so worried?” Still, there’s that 10% of you on the opposite end thinking, “Oh my god, this is going to be a disaster. Everyone’s right, this is a terrible idea. It’s going to go badly wrong.”
The success is the moment where it’s extremely validating. That 10% of you disappears and you go, “I knew I was right about this. I knew it was something people wanted.” But there’s always that slice of you naysaying; that voice in your head that is listening to all those voices of reason around you telling you it’s too crazy, and it won’t work.
It’s always too something. Too much of this, too much of that. I don’t just mean for Barbie. For a lot of these movies that we’ve taken big swings on, that’s been the case. Maybe every film. Thankfully, in more cases than not, it has worked out, but you’re scared every time because no matter how much that 90% of you believes in it, there are no guarantees in this industry. There is always a big, big chance that it’s not going to hit.
And I do believe we could have made the exact same movie and just released it at a different time, and it might not have hit the culture in the way it did. Timing is a huge part of it, too. A brilliant movie is a brilliant movie, whether it comes out now or in 20 years. You can watch The Wolf of Wall Street a decade later and hopefully it still holds up. I watch movies from a hundred years ago and they’re still brilliant. But especially in the case of Barbie, I think the moment was what allowed it to hit in the exact way that it did. The temperature in the world just really wanted the big injection of joy that the movie represents. I think there was a feeling out there that everyone needed this movie at the time it came out.
DEADLINE: It came out on the same day as Oppenheimer, a film about the end of the world. That film didn’t make quite as much at the box office, but it, too, was a huge hit; people went to see both movies to scratch different itches. With Barbie, it’s hard to recall the last time we had such a warm-hearted comedy at this level.
ROBBIE: I’d really been missing silly comedy. Silly, smart comedy. I always thought of the tone along the lines of Austin Powers, and when I read the script, that was the tone that rang out. A lot of physical comedy, a lot of silly but smart jokes, something very referential. That kind of comedy had all but disappeared from mainstream cinema for a number of years. Honestly, probably Austin Powers is the last time I felt it. Everything became very specific; comedy for this kind of audience, or that kind of audience. We were missing the silly, smart comedy that could be a hit for everybody. I was really excited we could do that; that it didn’t feel like a movie made for a specific group of people. No, this was for everyone.
At the same time, there was also a lot of specificity to the humor that Greta and Noah put in there. There are definitely jokes that some people are going to find funny that will go over other peoples’ heads. The fact that they were able to have both notes playing at the same time made the film a really beautiful orchestral piece; you’ve got these big, broad bits that are going to hit with the masses, and then these grace notes that will hit with specific people. I mean, there’s a joke about Proust in there [laughs]. Some things will go over some people’s heads. That’s why it’s been such a joy to watch with different audiences, to see which pockets of the cinema burst into laughter at which jokes.
It’s because people are really specific, and people are really weird. Things just tickle you for some reason, and other things don’t, and everyone has different things. What was so clever was that Greta and Noah were able to layer in so many different brands of humor that the movie worked for everybody but also felt like it was made just for you. That’s really special. The magic of the movie is how personal it feels, even though it’s extremely big. And it really was a personal movie; we put a lot of ourselves into it.
DEADLINE: This journey starts with you identifying Barbie as the right material — the right corporate IP, you might say — to bring this approach to. Given you couldn’t have known what you’d be able to get away with when you took those first steps — and most remarkably, that you didn’t even initially see this as a project for you to star in — why was Barbie the one?
ROBBIE: One of the main reasons was that the name ‘Barbie’ is just so globally recognizable. It’s like Coca-Cola and McDonald’s. You can’t compare it even to something like The Little Mermaid; it’s so much bigger than that. It’s comparable to the biggest conglomerate brand names. So, that’s an immediate recognition of the potential outreach. But more important than that was knowing that people had such strong feelings about Barbie, good or bad.
There was something I realized after the fact when we made I, Tonya, which was that when we were putting the movie out there, everybody we were showing it to had already decided how they felt about Tonya Harding; before they ever watched the movie. It was something I hadn’t taken into account as we made it, because I didn’t know Tonya Harding when I read that script. The first time I read it, I thought the story was fictional. So, I totally overlooked the element that audiences would have a built-in perspective of our protagonist before they sat down and watched it. That’s a really interesting place to start to share an experience with an audience. People came with a feeling already associated to Tonya, again, good or bad, and the movie then had to take them on a journey to question that feeling. With Barbie, I really felt like we could do something similar but on a much grander scale.
So, yes, it was a piece of IP that was floating around, and I could recognize that somebody was going to do something with it, so we were keeping tabs on it. But the bigger thing was having that I, Tonya thing again but on a bigger scale, where everyone had strong feelings about it, a nostalgic connection, and a time capsule of feelings they might have had when they were kids.
Over the years, Barbie has elicited very strong responses from people. People have made signs to protest Barbie. They’ve been writing think-pieces about Barbie for years. People have boycotted the toys, people have collected the toys, people play with the toys, people preserve the toys and never touch them. So many different feelings.
DEADLINE: With Tonya Harding, it’s fair to say that most people had a negative association with her for what she did. The movie’s opportunity was to subvert that, to show who she was and where she came from. The inherent challenge of how you describe Barbie, then, is how do you reach all those different groups? How do you appeal to those that hate Barbie and think it’s hideous corporate IP that is projecting troubling beauty standards on young women while not alienating those who unapologetically love Barbie and see the dolls as a key part of their identity? On paper it feels like the two shouldn’t be compatible.
ROBBIE: We really didn’t want to avoid or appease anyone in particular. I feel that whenever characters or movies hit and feel successful, they’re holding up a mirror to the audience. Art is a way for us to understand ourselves: “By analyzing this character and their behavior, and the circumstances they’re in, I’m now able to make sense of something in my life.” That’s what I think every movie should strive to do, because you have to make it feel personal for the audience. You’ve got to make it resonate with them.
That’s not to say we all sat down trying to figure out the puzzle as you describe it. All I knew going into it was that there was an opportunity here to do that thing. It took a really smart person like Greta Gerwig to find the story, and figure out how to unpack all those things. I knew she wouldn’t be glossing over the spiky bits, which was important in our writer/director. I knew she wouldn’t be interested in doing that. She always wanted to explore both the good and the bad, because you don’t get a fully formed experience without looking at both.
But at the same time, and most important of all, it was about finding a person — and I always knew it should be Greta — who would be able to do it without mocking anything. Overall, it was important that it not be mean-spirited. It always had to come from a place of love. And I think it was about making it feel hopeful. It felt like we could hold the spiky bits and the warmth in the same hands.
At the end of the day, the movie is kind of not really about Barbie. Greta’s the genius that looked at it and went, “Aren’t humans so strange? They made a doll, then they got mad at the doll. That’s just insane.” And it’s true; we created Barbie and then we got mad at Barbie, because then we didn’t have to get mad at ourselves. We could shout at her; we could project onto her all of the perceived failings in the world, and we could direct the blame at her. It’s an inanimate object [laughs]. Isn’t that just so crazy?
I can’t claim any of these thoughts were fully fleshed out when I went after the rights for Barbie. But I knew someone would have those thoughts, and I recognized the opportunity and the kind of playground that someone smart like a Greta Gerwig could have fun in.
DEADLINE: With LuckyChap, you’ve embraced that sense of holding the good and the bad in the same hands. Not just with I, Tonya and Barbie. It’s there in the work of Emerald Fennell — with Promising Young Woman and Saltburn — and it’s there in Birds of Prey. It feels baked into the DNA. Did it feel like a radical approach when you set out with the company?
ROBBIE: Honestly, I just don’t know what the point is in making a movie if you’re not trying to dig deep and explore something like that. And maybe it’s because I love old movies so much. I rewatch movies voraciously. Some people never see a movie twice, but I’m a serial rewatcher, and I think, if I’m not going to try and make something that’s better than the films I already love, I’d rather use the time rewatching them. I have no problem watching The Philadelphia Story for the 50th time. I have no problem watching Bridesmaids for the 100th time. So, unless I’m striving to make a movie that’s as good as those movies, I’m just going to rewatch them.
Also, it costs so much to make a movie. Sometimes you’ll read a script and think, “Why is this being made? There’s nothing new or interesting. Nothing better than what has already been done a million times before. Why would anyone want to spend millions of dollars — sometimes tens or hundreds of millions of dollars — on something we’ve already seen?” That is just crazy to me. It’s a horrible waste of money, and a horrible waste of people’s time. It takes years to make a movie, and it takes so much money to make a movie, so if you’re not really trying to do something, I just don’t know why you’d bother at all.
Maybe studios have quotas to fill and release dates to hit, but as producers, we don’t. There’s no tally we have to hit, like, “By the time I’m 50 I have to have made 30 movies.” It’s like, no, just make the great ones. I just don’t understand how you muster the energy to start the journey by aiming for mediocrity.
None of this sounds like anything that should need to be pointed out, except in this industry, it really does. So many careers are thrown away by business decisions that boil down to, “Play it safe. Don’t rock the boat. Follow the precedent. Rinse and repeat.” The kind of advice that fills bad representatives’ bank accounts, but never really contributes anything to the artform.
It’s autopilot, and a lot of it comes from a place of fear. People make the safe choice because everything feels scary. I get that, too. Trust me, like I said, I’ve got 10% of that in me. I just happen to have that 90% of me that’s more optimistic, so the 10% that’s operating from a place of fear can only ever make me aware of the scary potential outcomes. It really can’t sway my decisions.
And look, it isn’t the ’90s anymore. The landscape has changed. It is changing every day. People constantly tell you nobody is going to the movies anymore, and I feel comfortable going, “Well, actually…” They’ll say, “There aren’t the movies anymore,” and it’s like, “No, more movies are being made than ever before.” You acknowledge all those voices you hear, but you have to stop and fact-check them a little bit, and then give yourself a reality check: is that the case?
When it’s not my money being put up, that’s easier for me to say. If I were putting up all the money, I might be operating from a place of more fear. But if you act on that impulse every time, you’re going to play things way too safe, and I don’t believe you can really make great art when you’re playing things safe.
There’s a difference between being responsible and playing it safe, absolutely. A big, big difference. We are always being responsible. We’re responsible producers and filmmakers. But I definitely can’t stand the idea of playing things safe.
DEADLINE: Perhaps that 10% is essential, then. Because success breeds confidence, and if that confidence becomes absolute, you risk the loss of responsibility. How many great artists lost their power when they started operating from a place of absolutely no fear? Martin Scorsese never did — every project for him is a swing for the fences he’s reasonably, but not absolutely, confident is worth the swing — but some wind up swinging wildly, and their later work struggles to connect.
ROBBIE: Yeah. You’ve got to be careful with that confidence, because it might not be confidence in yourself. It might be confidence in the way that you did it before that worked out, but it’s not necessarily going to work out again for you because of the way the world is changing. Like I said, there are no guarantees in this industry. You just have to listen to all the different voices in your head.
DEADLINE: You’re a serial rewatcher. Metering what you described comes from understanding the history of the artform in all its forms. Didn’t you establish a regular screening program on the set of Barbie?
ROBBIE: Yeah, we did a Movie Church every Sunday morning. All the cast and crew were invited to the Notting Hill Electric, and we’d play a movie that was somehow a reference for Barbie. Greta would reference The Red Shoes when we were talking about the exact kind of color LUT that we wanted. Or she’d reference His Girl Friday when she’d say, “I want all the Barbies to talk at this pace.” Or the more obvious direct references like 2001: A Space Odyssey. There are so many Kubrick references for a Barbie movie [laughs]. There’s even a Shining reference in there.
DEADLINE: He would probably have approved.
ROBBIE: Yeah, I think he would have [laughs].
But because Barbie was created in 1959, Greta was most inspired by the ’50s soundstage musicals, and particularly those dreamscape moments. That was what was so magical about stepping onto our set, because of how everything was painted, everything was artificial. We came up with the term ‘authentically artificial’ — I’d been calling it ‘really fake’, but ‘authentically artificial’ sounds better. We were striving for in-camera trickery.
The painted backdrops were probably the most exciting thing to watch evolve. We’d have 15 minutes after a production meeting, before we had to gather for the next one, and so I’d run over to the soundstages just to watch them paint the mountains.
Watching artistry on a movie of the scale of Barbie is just mind-blowing. It kind of encompassed the whole experience of the movie, because there’s nothing like getting to witness that artistry practiced on the biggest scale. That’s where you find the magic, like all those classics from the ’50s. You feel it when you know that someone is there painstakingly orchestrating it for you. It isn’t just the infinite possibilities of a computer program. It’s handmade and it’s happening in real time purely for your enjoyment. There’s something special about that.
DEADLINE: That resonates because it might explain the enormous success the movie has enjoyed. It’s very easy to be cynical about mainstream cinema; that it’s moviemaking by committee, that it’s all about bombast and blue screens, that it’s just the exploitation of corporate IP. And plenty of movies are exactly that. But there’s no experience in the world like stepping onto a set built with the resources of a budget north of $100 million. Something that’s there, that you can touch and interact with. The greatest artists of cinema practicing their art at the highest levels, from dozens of different disciplines. And you feel that in the finished movie.
ROBBIE: I completely agree with you. I love being on set. There are people that don’t, and I’ll never get it. But you can tell the people who are lifers; who want to spend every day of the rest of their lives on a film set. It’s this huge array of personalities and people from every walk of life, and you’re all together for several months, and you become really close. That’s a thing that happens less and less these days, in all aspects of life. Even online, people get pushed into groups of people who are just like them. Something I appreciate so much about a film set is spending time with people who do completely different things to me, but we’ve all still got a common goal; making that movie. As an actor, that’s just crucial, spending time around so many different personalities. It’s a valuable thing.
DEADLINE: Do you remember the first moment you stepped onto a set and felt that magic?
ROBBIE: It was probably Neighbours, because the stuff I did before that was so small, so low-budget, it would be hard to describe them as real film sets. It was just like you, the director, and a camera in a tiny room. On Neighbours, it was a proper studio. There was a whole machine working to make this show come together. It was multi-cam, so you had three cameras moving, and a switchboard cutting things together as we acted. It was my first experience of the mechanisms of filmmaking, and I think people often don’t talk about soap operas in that way, but they really should. The pace is insane.
I feel like people don’t truly appreciate when someone makes a great film at a big budget. That’s a skillset that many filmmakers — maybe most filmmakers — can’t pull off. A giant scale movie flexes a whole different set of muscles, and very few people can do it. But it’s often dismissed, like you said, as, “Oh, it’s popcorn.” Mate, it’s the big leagues, is what it is.
Soaps work at such a pace that it’s its own amazing skillset. Everyone has to work well together or it can’t function. So, walking onto that set, and seeing all those departments working in unison and working so fast, was fascinating for me. I couldn’t have enough eyes. I wanted to know what everyone was doing, and how they were doing it. It was absolutely fascinating. I loved it. I loved it so much. And I was on it for three years, so I walked off that set with an education, and I knew that it would by far be the hardest set I ever worked on. I knew everything would be easier after that, because nothing else on earth shoots at that kind of pace.
DEADLINE: Did you know the show beforehand?
ROBBIE: I had watched it, of course. You can’t really avoid it being an Australian; it’s like Neighbours and Home and Away are always on. It’s kind of omnipresent, like Vegemite.
DEADLINE: You mention wanting to know what every department was doing; was that the start of your ambitions to produce?
ROBBIE: Yes. It hadn’t been articulated in my mind at that point as wanting to become a producer, but I was very aware that I was fascinated by the whole mechanism of the set. I didn’t know how that would evolve with my career, but it makes sense that it has become producing.
I’ve never had tunnel vision on set. Some actors do, and there’s a part of me that envies the tunnel vision that some actors have where they’re solely focused on their character and the job they’re there to do. Part of me wishes I were that kind of actor because I wonder if I might be a better actor in that case. But I can’t help it. I love all of it.
I remember when I was on PanAm, I would just pepper the DP with a million questions. On Neighbours, there was never any time for that because we moved at a crazy pace. Suddenly, I was on a television show where we had the luxury of time. We shot one episode a month on PanAm. Still fast by movie standards, but I came from doing one episode a day. Now it was one a month, so, in my mind, that was all the time in the world. Setups would take 45 minutes sometimes, so I’d just be asking the director questions, or bothering the DP.
So, one day the DP came and gave me this book, The Five C’s of Cinematography, that I still have to this day. He said, “Just read this. You’re asking so many questions, just read this book.” He’d probably had enough of me. But I loved this book, I learned so much. I didn’t go to film school or anything, and I would have loved to because I found how much I love learning about this stuff.
DEADLINE: You mentioned LUTs earlier. Very few people outside the camera department know what LUTs are.
ROBBIE: Yeah, I love the color science. Coming up with a color table. I obviously don’t come up with the color table, but the scientists that do — and they really are scientists — are amazing to me. Watching Rodrigo [Prieto] on Barbie was so much fun. I’d worked with him on The Wolf of Wall Street, so it was a reunion. Every second on set, he’s adjusting the color table. Whenever I wasn’t in a take I would run to his tent and watch him, because some DPs set the shot and then sit back while everyone else does their thing, but not Rodrigo. He’s constantly adjusting it. I was like, “Is this a continuity issue?” And he said, “It would be more of a continuity issue if I weren’t adjusting it. I’m leveling it all the time because it’s changing all the time.”
DEADLINE: Many actors establish production companies to find material for them to star in. With Barbie, you set out seeing Gal Gadot in the lead role, and only wound up playing the part when she wasn’t available. It feels like LuckyChap was established in the mould of, say, a Plan B, where it’s more about making great material regardless of whether there’s a role for you.
Plan B was always the north star for us. Just in terms of the quality of the movies they’re producing, and as an example of a production company that’s known for the movies it makes as opposed to the talent behind it. I have actor friends who tell me they want to establish a production company, and I’m always like, “Tell me exactly why, because I might be urging you not to do it.” Because actually, if it’s not about making films for other people, you kind of put yourself in a bad position to negotiate for yourself if you take this approach. Once you’re a producer on something, you’ve got no leverage, you’ve got no negotiating power. So, yes, you might have creative control, but you’re going to get paid like sh*t, so be careful what you wish for. It’s also such a lot of work that sometimes just starring in something else is a better thing to do if that’s your goal.
DEADLINE: You’ve managed to get quite a lot of movies across the line in your first decade.
ROBBIE: Yeah. I mean, I haven’t worked anywhere else, so it’s hard to know if what we’re doing is different from what other people are doing. If we’re any more successful at it or whatever. Producing is such a nebulous job, and everyone has different priorities. I have some producer friends who just want to get things going because for them it’s all about collect the fees, collect the fees, collect the fees. I suppose it depends what the setup is for success, really. For us, it’s definitely quality over quantity, and making sure we maintain a level of quality in anything we do.
That’s something that gets easier. We’re going to be 10 years old next year, and it’s definitely easier for us to do that now. At the beginning, it was about getting what you could get.
If someone’s going to let you produce their movie, you’re like, OK, let’s go. It’s hard to be idealistic about the kind of films you want to make when you’re just lucky to get anything at all. The lucky thing for us was the big success we had with I, Tonya, which meant we could immediately pivot into maintaining certain standards. The ethos of the company was always there, and our mantra was always there, but we could be afforded to be strict with ourselves and stick to that mantra once we had a little success.
DEADLINE: You’ve established a brand at this point.
ROBBIE: I hope so. And we don’t want brand identity as an ego thing. It’s so that people can think of us, really, because the brand is about making good things. If that’s not the goal then you’re not at the top of anyone’s call list. But if you’re like, “OK, we do female stories and female storytellers,” suddenly it’s like, “Oh, well here’s a script with a female protagonist, I know I want to speak to LuckyChap.” That was always the plan, to funnel material and filmmakers our way, because the brand identity kind of shines a light on the stuff we’re interested in.
DEADLINE: You’ve just made a second film with Emerald Fennell, Saltburn. How has it felt to you to watch her develop as a filmmaker?
ROBBIE: We are so lucky to have built this relationship with Emerald. It started a long time ago, and it could easily have not been a thing, but we read a half-hour network pilot she wrote, and it was so different in tone from Promising Young Woman and Saltburn for sure. It was a pretty broad comedy. But it was undeniable that she was a unique voice, and that was why we wanted to meet her. As soon as we did, it was like, “You’re brilliant, we’ll do anything you want.”
We didn’t get the pilot off the ground, but she came back and pitched the cold open for Promising Young Woman, and it was an easy yes for us. It’s been amazing, and she’s such a talent, and whether we’d had that meeting or not, she’d have become who she is regardless. I’m just glad it was us. I know the things we loved most were the spiky bits that someone else might have wanted to have shaved off.
DEADLINE: Is there a plan to make something with her that you will star in?
ROBBIE: I would love to. It’s a real act of self-control not to snatch up all the roles with her scripts, because all of them are so delicious. I’m trying to be really unselfish, because as truly tempting as they all are, we really didn’t start this company to make star vehicles. I also definitely never want to hold up a production. When Emerald has got a script ready to go, it’s ready to go. It’s not development. It’s not like, “Oh, in a year and a half we’ll start piecing this together.” So, unless that lines up perfectly, I’m not going to be the person that holds it up.
And it also ends up being an exciting way to work with other actresses we love. We’ve got our wishlist of actresses we love, and as soon as Emerald hands you a script, you’re like, “Oh, we could get them now.”
DEADLINE: So, what is next on your agenda? Is it the Ocean’s Eleven prequel?
ROBBIE: Well, that’s still in development. Word got out about that; we didn’t release anything because it’s way too soon, to be honest. Whether it winds up being the next thing, I don’t know. I don’t think so. It’s a pretty big project to put together and there are certain logistical things that we have to time it around.
For us a company, we have a film with Olivia Wilde [Naughty], which is moving quite quickly, so that could be the next thing we shoot. I’m not acting in it, just producing. A couple of TV things should go this year too. And for me as an actor, I love acting in things that I’m not a producer on, so I’m looking at a couple of things but there’s nothing concrete yet.
DEADLINE: Time for a break?
ROBBIE: Everyone says that. Everyone’s like, “Are you having a break?” And I’m like, “You do know I’m a producer, right? We don’t get a break [laughs].”
DEADLINE: That’s why people ask, out of concern.
ROBBIE: [Laughs] True. No, the producing is 24/7, but on the acting side, this is the longest I haven’t acted on a set, because we finished Barbie in October of 2022. So, it’s already been more than a year since I was on set as an actor, and other than Covid, that’s the first time that’s ever happened.
I also think everyone’s probably sick of the sight of me for now. I should probably disappear from screens for a while. Honestly, if I did another movie too soon, people would say, “Her again? We just did a whole summer with her. We’re over it.” I don’t know what I’ll do next, but I hope it’s a little while away.
DEADLINE: You’ve revealed yourself to be a cinematography nerd in this interview. Are we going to see you direct eventually?
ROBBIE: I really do want to direct. I’ve felt like I wanted to direct for about the last seven years. But I’ve always seen it as a privilege, not a right. I’ve been slowly working towards the feeling that I’ve earned the right to direct, and I feel I’m getting close to that feeling now.
It’s hard, too, because I’ve been so fortunate to work with so many amazing directors, and to learn from them. Often, when something comes to me, it’s like, “Wouldn’t it be great to act in that so I can watch them direct?” It’s funny how many directors ask me about the people I’ve worked with. They say, “Oh, does Scorsese pre-light and then rehearse?” Or, “Does Damien Chazelle plan the music before the scene?” You realize that directors never get to see how other directors work. I get to see exactly how Greta does rehearsals and how Marty blocks, or doesn’t. It’s such a gift to learn from all these directors firsthand. But I would really like to direct. I’m not in any rush, because I feel that there’ll never be enough time to learn all the things I want to learn before I take that plunge, but I definitely have that itch, and it’s growing too strong. I don’t know how much longer I’ll be able to hold off.