Starstruck: Margot Robbie

By Brian J. Robb

STARSTRUCK: MARGOT ROBBIE

She steals the show in Suicide Squad, but who was MARGOT ROBBIE before she became Harley Quinn?

Margot Robbie’s dramatic rise to fame is chronicled by New York Times best-selling author Brian J. Robb, whose previous subjects have included Leonardo DiCaprio, Brad Pitt, Matt Damon, and Johnny Depp.

From television exposure in Neighbours and Pan Am, Robbie rode the wave of a series of glamorous roles in The Wolf of Wall Street and Focus, as well as delivering more dramatic, yet lower-key performances in Z for Zachariah and Whiskey Tango Foxtrot. She’s also played an unattainable object of desire in About Time, Jane in a revisionist Tarzan movie, and explained complex financial instrument while luxuriating in a bubble bath in The Big Short.

More than just a pretty face, Robbie is transitioning into producing her own films, beginning with noir thriller Terminal. None of this came about by accident, as Robbie set out to assault Hollywood according to a carefully worked out plan, as revealed in STARSTRUCK: MARGOT ROBBIE.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR 
Brian J. Robb is the New York Times and Sunday Times bestselling biographer of Leonardo DiCaprio, Johnny Depp, and Brad Pitt. He has also written books on silent cinema, the films of Philip K. Dick, Wes Craven, and Laurel and Hardy, the Star Wars movies, Superheroes, Gangsters, and Walt Disney, as well as science fiction television series Doctor Who and Star Trek. His illustrated books include an Illustrated History of Steampunk and a guide to J.R.R. Tolkien’s Middle-earth (Winner, Best Book, Tolkien Society Awards). He writes and edits the Chaplin: Film by Film centenary blog site and is co-editor of the Sci-Fi Bulletin website. He lives in Edinburgh. 

Author web site: https://brianjrobb.wordpress.com/ 

WHAT THE CRITICS SAID: BRIAN J. ROBB

Counterfeit Worlds: Philip K. Dick on Film (2005)

“A recommended, well-researched effort … Thoughtful, meticulous and well-composed, Counterfeit Worlds is the definitive work on its topic.” — Paul M. Sammon, author of Future Noir

‘Comprehensive… Robb has successfully reawakened an awkward, prophetic voice.’ — Tom Dewe Matthews, Sight & Sound

‘Well researched and passionately written… absorbing…’ — Total Film

‘As a collective resource, this is a valuable one.’ — Empire

‘Studiously researched and intelligently written…’ — Film Review

Steampunk: The Illustrated History (2012)

‘…pretty damn comprehensive, focusing primarily on the literary and cinematic history of steampunk … It’s a gorgeous hardback with great choices for illustrations.’ — Steampunk Scholar, Best of 2012

A Brief History of Superheroes (2014)

‘…all a comic enthusiast could want from a book that seems to have most of the useful information on comics, its creators and those who paved the way for other successful comic characters during the 80s, 90s and beyond.’ — The SF Site 

A Brief History of Star Trek (2012)

‘This is a truly excellent history of Star Trek. Totally unauthorized, but author Brian J. Robb was editor of The Official Star Trek Magazine for over a decade, so he knows his stuff. Lots of facts, but also lots of thoughtful analysis. Speaking as a life-long Trek fan, this one is well worth reading.’ — SF author Robert J. Sawyer

• Language: English
• Publisher: Glencairn Press
• Release date: Aug 3, 2016
• ISBN: 9781536583519

Book preview

Chapter One

From ‘Maggot’ to Margot

At first glance Margot Robbie appears the very definition of ‘overnight’ success. In just three years, she has gone from a virtually unknown jobbing Australian actress recently arrived in Hollywood to a global superstar with name recognition, acclaimed as the best thing in the movie Suicide Squad (2016). However, behind that meteoric rise there was a lot of hard work, an unstinting aspiration to succeed, and a determination that success was just one more job away.

From her provocative and attention grabbing near-nude appearance in Martin Scorsese’s The Wolf of Wall Street (2013), through co-starring with Will Smith in Focus (2015), to playing Jane to Alexander Skarsgård’s Tarzan in 2016’s The Legend of Tarzan, Margot Robbie played the Hollywood game like a pro. When she landed the iconic role of DC Comics’ antihero Harley Quinn (partner to the Joker) in 2016’s summer blockbuster Suicide Squad, her ascension to the top of the Hollywood star system was all but complete. Margot Robbie’s journey to superstardom began, however, many years ago at a famous fictional Australian address: Ramsay Street, in the perennial soap opera Neighbours.

Margot Elise Robbie was born on 2 July 1990 in Dalby, Queensland in Australia. Just over 200 miles northwest of the state capital Brisbane on Australian’s East coast, the town of Dalby was founded in the early 1840s. On that July day in 1990 the population of just over 12,000 grew by at least one with the arrival of Margot Robbie, but she would not be a resident for too long.

When her parents divorced, Margot moved with her mother, Sarie Kessler, a physiotherapist, and her three siblings (two older, one younger) to Australia’s Gold Coast, a small city on the Pacific shore of the Curumbin Valley in South East Queensland, about 500 miles from Sydney. During Margot’s childhood, Sarie worked with the elderly, but switched to working with disabled people in more recent years. Margot has an older brother, Lachlan, known as ‘Lockie’, and an older sister, Anya. She’s not the youngest in her family, though, with a younger brother named Cameron.

Occasionally, Margot would visit with her father, who then owned a fruit farm in the wild Australian countryside, as well as staying with cousins or extended family back in Dalby. Contact with her father has been limited since she left home, with terse comments to the media indicating a strained relationship, such as when asked what traits she has in common with him, she replied: ‘None. Nothing, I’m not like him at all.’ Her mother alone raised Margot following the divorce. ‘I adore my mother. She’s the most pure-hearted, divine human being. We had farming on both sides. My mother's family raised grains and crops. My father's grew sugarcane and mangos ... I knew more about the basics of farming than of acting. [I] knew how to drive a tractor and milk cows.’

Her childhood has been described as ‘rural’ and ‘outdoorsy’, and the image of rural Australian life inevitably conjured certain clichéd images in the minds of the media. It was an idyllic image Robbie would both play up to and lampoon in interviews. ‘People always want to know, Did you have kangaroos outside your bedroom window?’ she told Vanity Fair. ‘I’m like, Yes, but none of my other friends did. Or, Did you have snakes running around? And again, Yes, in our house, but this isn’t an Australian thing. [It] only encourages stereotypes.’

Physical activity was a major outlet for the sporty young Margot, and there was little she wouldn’t attempt. ‘I’m happiest when I’m surfing or out on the farm hunting wild pigs, building cubbies out in the paddocks or riding around on motorbikes,’ she told one interviewer, during her days on Neighbours. ‘I always have to be doing something. If I’m not at home I have to be at the beach surfing. I love surfing. I bought my first board at a garage sale when I was about ten. I also love jet skiing and snowboarding.’

As she was something of a tomboy and always scruffy, if not dirty and sweaty thanks to all this physical activity, Margot’s childhood nickname among her close friends was ‘Maggot’. ‘It started when I was five, and I detested it,’ she admitted to GQ magazine. ‘By the time I was eight I realised it wasn’t going anywhere, so I embraced it.’ She’d always had an issue with the given name her mother had chosen for her. ‘I always said, Mom—there was a really cool way of spelling my name, and you picked the boring way that gets everyone confused. They forget the T or call me Mar-got. Now everyone’s finally spelling my name right—that’s how I knew I’d made it...’

During her early years following the divorce, the family struggled for money meaning the young Margot had to work to help out as well as attending school. At the age of 10 she secured a position in a local restaurant polishing the cutlery, before graduating to the more demanding task of ‘chopping vegetables and waitressing’. By the final year of high school at Somerset College she was cleaning houses in and around town. Her independence and ability to earn her own money were important to the would-be actor, even at an early age. ‘I’ve worked three jobs at a time. I worked in a pharmacy, an office, at a warehouse, did catering. I was always trying to save up money.’

None of this got in the way of her academic studies, however. She worked hard at school, while playing hard at home. ‘My school was very academic. I was up there in English,’ she said. ‘I could have done law and a number of other things. But I was only second in my year for drama.’ Among the firm group of friends she grew up with, Margot certainly didn’t consider herself to be anything special, ironic given her eventual profession. In fact, she became somewhat envious of friends she considered better looking than herself. ‘You should have seen me at 14, with braces and glasses, gangly and doing ballet. In my big group of girlfriends at home, I am definitely not the best looking. I did not grow up feeling like I was particularly attractive.’

Childhood friend Aimee Smith recalled the escapades of Robbie’s circle of friends, known as the ‘heccas’ for their hectic lifestyle. ‘She is very adventurous,’ Smith told the Gold Coast Bulletin. ‘We will go to the rock pools, and she’s the one that jumps off. She’s not a girlie girl. Margot is so hilarious, quite witty. We’ve always know she was something special.’

Margot started exploring acting while in high school, although the stage or screen had not been her initial ambition. The first career she can recall being interested in was that of a magician, perhaps hinting at her growing desire to perform. She spent many hours practising magic tricks she thought were ‘genius’, before high school plays gave her a new outlet for her precocious talents. ‘I didn’t decide, I’m going to be an actress. I didn’t know that was a job. I thought that only happened to people born in Hollywood.’

Despite not quite grasping that acting was a career open to anyone if they were driven enough to pursue it, Margot found herself putting on shows for her siblings at home, often re-enacting whatever they’d recently been watching. ‘I used