Margot Robbie is famously Australian but you wouldn’t know it from her filmography: across some of the best Margot Robbie movies like The Wolf of Wall Street, I, Tonya, or this year’s billion-dollar blockbuster Barbie, you haven’t heard the actress’s natural Aussie accent ever the big screen. But there is one dialect that Margot keeps coming back to, and it ain’t an accident.
The performer-producer recently sat down with Variety to test whether she could recall some of her most memorable onscreen quotes. After correctly guessing Naomi Lapaglia’s famous “What are you, a fucking owl?” line from the actor’s Scorsese-directed breakout role, Robbie revealed why she loves doing a Brooklyn accent onscreen:
I find a Brooklyn accent far easier to do than other American regions because dropping the R is something we do in Australian as well.
Robbie also revealed that she “wouldn’t even know how to say” her The Wolf of Wall Street lines without a Brooklyn accent, it’s become “so ingrained” for her. Of course, The Harley Quinn actress also dips into the New York City dialect for the comic-book character’s famously thick Brooklyn accent. (Editor’s note: this writer is a Brooklyn native and can say that Robbie’s New Yawk accent is not the worst I’ve ever heard.)
However, other American accents don’t come as easily to the Dalby-born star, specifically the flat Pacific Northwest accent she had to master to play controversial figure skater Tonya Harding in I, Tonya, for which she was Oscar-nominated for Best Actress in 2018:
Hitting a really hard R is hard work for my mouth. The accent I did in I, Tonya, which is really, really strong Rs, like ‘I’m not a girly-girl,’ like ‘rrrrr ‘ on the Rs, whereas in The Wolf of Wall Street…she doesn’t even do an R. I found it much easier
On the opposite end of things, Robbie had to adopt a “non-accent” for her role as the titular fashion doll in Barbie. She told Vogue in a May 2023 cover story how she took on a “General American accent” that had to change throughout Barbie’s journey: at the beginning, the character speaks in a higher register and “everything is very definite” with no second thoughts or hesitations. However, as the film goes on and Barbie becomes more “human,” her register lowers and her speech pattern features more pauses.
Robbie dug into the topic of dialects during her Variety Actors on Actors discussion with Irishman Cillian Murphy. When the Oppenheimer star praised the actress on her American accents, she explained that Aussies have to “build the muscles” to take on Yank dialects:
Australians, like between our soft palate and hard palate, we’ve got one centimeter of space. Americans have three. So an American mouth just has more space and then, because of that, we use our lips more and our tongues are lazy, so when you’re doing an accent, you’re building that muscle and creating that space. That’s why I think it would be hard to be American doing an Australian accent.
Given how much she’s built up those muscles over the years, it’s not a shock then that Robbie never acts in her own dialect. As she told Variety:
I never act in my own accent, I actually don’t even know if I could now, it would be so weird. I’d feel like I’m just playing myself I think.
Guess we’ll just have to keep watching YouTube interviews if we want to hear that lovely Aussie accent in any upcoming movies.