Funny, tough and emotionally daring: Why Margot Robbie is one of the most versatile stars of her generation

It was a compliment of sorts but one hinting at the entrenched sexism within mainstream Hollywood. When Martin Scorsese cast the then little known Margot Robbie in The Wolf of Wall Street (2013), the first full widescreen shot of Robbie showed her posing on a bed in her lingerie and high heels, looking uncannily like Brigitte Bardot in the famous early scene in Jean-Luc Godard’s Le Mepris (1963). Robbie plays Naomi, the Brooklyn-born wife of the sleazy financier Jordan Belfort (Leonardo DiCaprio). He calls her the “Duchess of Bay Ridge” and loves to show her off as if she is an even more prized possession than his white Ferrari.

Naomi is a former model and Miller Lite girl. The voyeuristic montage of her in her bedroom evokes memories of Douglas Kirkland’s Look magazine photos of Marilyn Monroe. She is described in the script as “the hottest blonde ever”; it’s very evident that she is primarily there to be gawped at.

“The whole point of Naomi is that her body is her only form of currency in this world,” Robbie later said of the character.

Things have changed since 2013. Post #MeToo and Harvey Weinstein, you doubt that Scorsese could get away with portraying her on-screen, in the same way, today, even with the irony and cartoonish satire that runs through The Wolf of Wall Street.

Not that Robbie’s Naomi is ever just the passive object of DiCaprio’s leering gaze. She brings a subversive comic edge to the role. Scorsese had cast her after an unconventional audition in which she suddenly, and unexpectedly, smacked DiCaprio in the face.

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“In my head, I was like, ‘You have literally 30 seconds left in this room and if you don’t do something impressive nothing will ever come of it. It’s a once-in-a-lifetime chance, just take it,” she told Harper Bazaar of her impromptu decision to go off script, hit her co-star, and scream “F**k you!” at him. In hindsight, her gesture can be seen as an unconscious protest against the reductiveness and chauvinism in the screenplay but it won her the part.

The defiance and abrasiveness Robbie showed in the audition are found in many of her best roles. Look, for example, at the glorious moment in I, Tonya (2017) when she berates the skating judges. She is playing Tonya Harding, the skater from the wrong side of the tracks who earned global notoriety for her part in the assault against her Olympic rival, Nancy Kerrigan. In one key scene, Tonya confronts the judges to demand why she is never given the scores she deserves. They tell her “we also judge on presentation”, another way of putting her down because of her working-class background and cheap costumes. At first, Tonya looks devastated, deeply upset, but then she summons up her fighting spirit and snarls back at the judges: “Suck my dick!” The judges are completely flabbergasted.

British director Saul Dibb had cast Robbie in his film, Suite Française (2014), before The Wolf of Wall Street had been released. She played a supporting role as Celine, a French woman who has an affair with a German during the Nazi occupation. “I don’t care where he was born. They are human, just like us,” she says after being caught having sex with the enemy soldier in the woods.

“She (Robbie) was put forward on a tip that had come straight from Martin Scorsese that here is this incredible talent,” Dibb tells The Independent. “Back then, she did a reading. It was really honest, powerful, and felt quite raw. She put everything into it.” Dibb’s only small reservation was “the way that she looked – that she was so striking. That was the only barrier for me. I felt like I needed to make her look less striking, less glamorous”.

This was the film on which Robbie met her future husband, the assistant director Tom Ackerley. It was a challenging production. Weinstein was one of the financiers. “He was a truly malevolent force in the making of that film. It was one of the lowest points in my filmmaking career … as a director, you’re trying to drive the car and you’ve got this person (Weinstein) trying to grab the wheel,” Dibb says of the interfering US producer. He adds, though, that working with Robbie was one of the “highest parts” during an otherwise difficult shoot.

As Scorsese later wrote of her when she was chosen in Time magazine’s list of the 100 Most Influential People of 2017, Robbie has “an all-bets-off feistiness … a unique audacity that surprises and challenges and just burns like a brand into every character she plays”.

Since The Wolf of Wall Street, Robbie has gone on to become one of the most prolific and adventurous young stars in Hollywood. It has just been announced she is to play the lead in a new “female-fronted” version of Pirates of the Caribbean being developed at Disney. Whatever role is created for her, she is bound to bring levels of energy and mischief to it that will leave Johnny Depp’s Captain Jack Sparrow looking wan and strait-laced by comparison. The project will also consolidate her place at the top of the A-list.

Robbie never stops working. She turned 30 this week (on 2 July) and already has two Oscar nominations to her name (for I, Tonya and Bombshell) as well as a list of credits that some actors would take an entire career to assemble. Robbie has her own company, LuckyChap Entertainment (which she runs with her husband Ackerley and friends Sophia Kerr and Josey McNamara) as well as a now burgeoning career as a producer.

Since leaving soap opera Neighbours in 2011, Robbie has consistently made three or four new features each year, appearing in superhero movies, introspective period dramas, costume epics, and oddball comedies. She is attached to play Barbie in Greta Gerwig’s live-action film inspired by the Mattel toy (and which will be co-written by Gerwig and Noah Baumbach), and is due to appear opposite Christian Bale and Michael B Jordan in the next, as yet untitled, feature from David O Russell.

The Australian has built her career by accepting every challenge thrown at her. While other stars steer away from unsympathetic characters or fret about their status on set or insist on being shown in the most glamorous possible light, she steamrollers ahead. Her versatility is startling. Personal vanity rarely gets in the way.

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“Some people have this ingredient ‘x’. They have an aura around them … but there is an incredible down to earth quality that she had and I imagine still has,” Dibb says of Robbie. “She is incredibly personable. I don’t want to generalise but it can be an Antipodean quality. She comes from Australia – a kind of no-bullshit culture … it produces a lot of great actors and nearly always very honest actors.”

Robbie can go from playing a blue-collar anti-heroine like Harding to showing full regal hauteur as a pock-marked, balding Queen Elizabeth in Mary, Queen of Scots (2018). She can play a very wholesome, albeit fiery, Jane in The Legend of Tarzan (2016) and then follow that up the same year as DC Comics’ pig-tailed, delinquent supervillain, Harley Quinn in Suicide Squad (2016). Then, you will see her a few months later as Winnie the Pooh author AA Milne’s distracted, aristocratic wife Daphne in Simon Curtis’s brooding drama, Goodbye Christopher Robin (2017). Her knack for accents, whether streetwise Brooklyn or upper-class English, rivals that of a young Meryl Streep.

Scorsese wrote of Robbie’s “grounded, hardscrabble toughness” but she isn’t afraid to reveal her characters’ vulnerabilities and insecurities. One of the creepiest, most uncomfortable scenes in any recent film came in Jay Roach’s Bombshell (2019) in which she played Kayla Pospisil, an ambitious young executive at Fox News.

She is called in to meet the boss, Roger Ailes (John Lithgow), in a hotel room. She thinks they are having a serious discussion about whether she should be given an on-air role. “Stand up and give me a twirl,” he suddenly says to her. She agrees reluctantly but then Ailes, an obese and sinister figure, tells her to pull up her dress so he can see her legs. The scene is about power, humiliation, and abuse. Robbie plays it brilliantly, capturing her character’s disbelief and mounting dismay at Ailes’s behaviour. “Higher and higher,” he murmurs as she reluctantly raises her dress. The confidence with which she enters the room quickly crumbles and she begins to look utterly traumatised. This time, there is no hitting Ailes in the face or answering back with a few choice expletives, Tonya Harding-style. It’s a devastating moment and one that brings the human cost of Ailes’s reptilian behaviour far more sharply into focus than anything else in the movie.

When Robbie played Sharon Tate in Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood (2019), the director was clearly very thrown by a question from a journalist at the Cannes press conference for the film. “She (Robbie) is a person of great acting talent and yet you haven’t really given her many lines in this movie. I guess that was a deliberate choice on your part and I wondered why that was – that we don’t hear her speaking very much.”

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This, though, wasn’t another case of the male director shutting the female star up. Tarantino was paying heartfelt tribute to Tate. He was idealising her and trying to create an alternative history in which she avoided being killed by Charles Manson’s followers. As portrayed in the film, she represented the best of the spirit of the Sixties, before the Manson murders turned the decade sour. Robbie played Tate as a vibrant, energetic, and optimistic figure who takes delight in everything from hippy poolside parties to watching her own movies in downtown cinemas. Even without many lines of dialogue, it was a performance that combined lightness, grace, and charm.

As the profiles of Robbie never fail to remind readers, that relentless work ethic which has characterised her screen acting career was already there when she was starting out in the business in Australia. She took multiple jobs, “simultaneously cleaning houses, making sandwiches in Subway and working in a surf store to make ends meet” according to Harper’s Bazaar. Now, she will invariably have several different film projects on the boil at any given time. Sometimes her choices are erratic. The highly stylised film noir Terminal (2018), in which she starred and also produced, received scathing reviews. However, her filmography has very few duds. Even when her films don’t work, she will never give a dull performance.

In his Time magazine tribute, Scorsese likened Robbie to three legendary Hollywood figures: to the 1930 screwball star Carole Lombard for her comedic ability; to Joan Crawford for her toughness, and to Ida Lupino for her “emotional daring”. That might have seemed hyperbolic at the time but Robbie has lived up to such comparisons. Like Lupino, she has her own production company. In interviews, she has expressed interest in eventually directing films as well as producing and starring in them. By making superhero movies and Pirates of the Caribbean, she will give herself extra leverage to control her own projects. In the seven years since The Wolf of Wall Street, she very quickly established herself as a formidable presence in Hollywood. Forbes magazine included her on its 2017 list of “30 under 30” leading young Hollywood entrepreneurs, leaders and stars. Three years on, as she turns 30, her status has risen yet further.