Margot Robbie’s love of Harley Quinn is really only just beginning. A character enveloped in the fog of Suicide Squad has been unharnessed and allowed to break free into her own stratosphere of curious, eccentric, dangerous and downright sinister versions of rebellion, violence and evil. And yet, at the heart of Birds of Prey, and going further forward in the return of Suicide Squad, another (as yet untitled) Harley sequel, and Gotham City Sirens, we have at least another three installments of a DC character who thrills, fascinates and terrifies in equal measure.
Robbie’s desire to step back to the dark side comes after a more conservative period of acting in which real-life and biopic characterization has been the priority.
As someone now as comfortable and determined behind the camera as she is in front of it, it makes it only right then that in reaffirming her strength as an actress (as well as a producer) she should enjoy breaking out into an hour-and-a-half of chaos, nihilism and pseudo-madness in what will surely be one of the biggest box office smashes of the year.
The Australian actress’s passion for work and pursuit of cinematic creativity shows little sign of slowing down, despite regular reports stating that she and husband Tom Ackerley are about to break off to start a family. Her “baby,” for the time being at least, is a film script.
STRIPLV sat down and spoke to Robbie about the new film Birds of Prey and the Oscar-nominated film Bombshell, where Robbie plays a news anchor at Fox News who is sexually harassed by cable network head Roger Ailes.
STRIPLV: You have said that you fell in love with the role of Harley Quinn. What was it that made that happen? ROBBIE: I love everything about Harley Quinn. Every comic she is in, she is endearing, she is funny, and she is such a fun character for an actor to play because of her unpredictability. That gives you so much scope because she has an array of so many different reactions to anything that happens in a scene. She could use violence against someone else, violence against something else by smashing something up or breaking it, or she could be the total opposite of that, and she could leap on the person there and give them a big kiss because it’s all about what works for her and not for the other person. As well as it being fun, the almost infinite of possibilities makes it so easy to play a character like Harley, and I can safely say that I have never had so much fun or enjoyment either when I am reading the comics about her or when I am playing her in a role on screen. I love her. STRIPLV: You seem to be carving a niche for yourself where you can comfortably fit into the role of someone so dangerously eccentric as Harley, yet at the same time drop right back to a stylish, immaculate character, such as Queen Elizabeth or even Sharon Tate. ROBBIE: All I am really doing is acting. It’s flattering that the effortlessness of portraying those characters is coming through because that is really how it feels. Whether it’s someone toeing the line or someone going right out there on the farthest tip of acceptability, at the end of the day, it’s a thrill and a pleasure to play these sorts of roles. I like to think I put into each of them considerable personal investment and a good part of my own persona, but if you saw the characterization notes and the extent to which we take someone like Harley, work with who she already was then bring about new dimensions to her, you’d know that so much of the hard work is done by writers, producers and directors. I’ve really got the easy bit in all this, and that goes for all sorts of characters I’ve played. STRIPLV: What gave you the idea to pitch this movie as a stand-alone one? ROBBIE: When I was playing Harley in Suicide Squad, it was so fun and entertaining—even just for me immersing myself into the character—that I thought because she is only a part of the movie, wouldn’t it be amazing if we could take her aside and showcase even just a few parts of her personality. The fact that we see a lot more of what goes into Harley’s personality, and in giving her more screen time, makes us appreciate her as a character a lot more and what she brings to the DCU as a whole. We see her in her element, in her comfort zone, we see where she lives, and how she lives, what she likes to do when she is free of being assigned something to do. We see what clothes she chooses to wear for herself, instead of the limited options she is given from the box in Suicide Squad. Also, the normal-ish things in her life – what she wears when she likes to go out and get drunk, and the aftermath of that; how she deals with a hangover. (Laughs) There are many personal things to Harley, she’s not too dissimilar to anyone else like that, and it’s nice to have that window into her life. STRIPLV: There’s also a powerful feminist vibe to the movie. Would you agree? ROBBIE: I think we need to be careful not to just assume there is a feminist vibe to something just because it’s a movie that enriches all those elements of female empowerment. When it is the other way round, and men are leading out all the very masculine ideals, we don’t go on about it, reinforcing male and manly stereotypes in that way, so I think it pays to consider what the real point is. Is it just an action movie with an iconic female lead? What I certainly do agree on is it’s no bad thing to keep these forceful characters out there, and Harley obviously has a lot more coming up in which she can continue to evolve on screen well beyond what we have done so far. STRIPLV: Has anyone commented to you about the likeness between Gwen Stefani and Harley Quinn. Is there anything in there from yourself where her image is intentionally similar? ROBBIE: I think Gwen has undergone a number of incredibly stylish image changes. I can see the comparison, but I think Harley is quite a generic tomboy rather than being molded on anyone in particular, and certainly not Gwen. STRIPLV: You don’t just play Harley in this movie, but you also worked as a producer on the film. Did it make you proud to be a part of a project that brought so many strong female roles into it? ROBBIE: When I am an actor, it’s all about working with as many other great actors on a project, a movie, whatever I may be doing at that time. That’s what I love doing and what I live to do. When you get the chance to be a producer, and especially on a movie like this, it means you are able to introduce talented women into characters and roles where you may not necessarily be familiar with them before. For a comic-book movie to be made up of almost entirely all female actors, that’s rare. To be part of a team who is setting a new trend for that and paving the way for others to follow suit, that’s a really big responsibility, and I would like to think that we have achieved it first-time around. STRIPLV: Do you see Harley Quinn as a hero, a villain, an antihero, or something else? ROBBIE: I don’t really see Harley as someone who is truly evil, but then again, she isn’t someone who is totally good, either. I think the thing with Harley is that she has completely different sets of rules and morals to many other people, so the things that she does that she thinks may be good, to other people, may be quite bad, and usually they are. It’s not that she isn’t aware of the difference between what is right and wrong. It’s more that they are just different from what some other people may think is right and wrong, and there are certainly different levels of wrong. Also, she has different priorities and things of importance to others, and that’s why people may judge her to be bad or anti-good, depending on their own moral compass. STRIPLV: What would you like women who watch this movie to take away from it? ROBBIE: Well, when I first pitched this movie, it was based on the fact that every day in my life, I am almost always surrounded by a group of women. That can be anything from the fellow actors and crew members who I work with or people who are friends and family of mine, and it literally just occurred to me one day that I hadn’t really been a part of a group of women on screen. I think what makes this film work especially well is that Harley is part of a group of girls that help her show us her personality as best as she possibly can. The group that she is with may not look like it would go together and work at first glance. They are from quite different backgrounds. They vary in age, one of the group, who is in the police, and the other members are all anarchists. But the advantage they get from having that eclectic mix of women is that they can all offer something different at different times, and that’s a nice message for society in times where diversity is actually splitting people apart. STRIPLV: What do you mean? ROBBIE: Diversity is taken as a positive because we are celebrating the difference in cultures. What I think we need to be careful of is obsessing so much about the differences that we forgot to consider the likenesses that unite us. STRIPLV: How is this film different from the other DC movies which have gone before it? ROBBIE: This is like a narrative movie from the point of view of Harley Quinn, and just like she is, it’s one of a kind and inimitable. There are so many of Harley’s own personal identifying qualities within the film itself, including the fun and violence, the humor and the darkness, the colorful side of things, and the irreverent sides, the strange and the bizarre. Everything which Harley has in her make-up, and by that I mean her DNA, not her face paints (Laughs) that is also used to put the film together and I think it’s something which represents her really well, represents her character and makes this film stand alone from the other DC movies. STRIPLV: O.K., Let’s change subjects. What did you think when you first got the script for “Bombshell”? ROBBIE: When I first got the script, I think it just struck me on an obvious deep level. A deeply moral level, and I felt a certain urge to be a part of that conversation. A conversation about sexual harassment in the workplace. And having that conversation with all of its complexities. Up until reading this script, I guess I was so encouraged that the revolution is finally getting up on its feet. You know I don’t feel like we’ve had the chance to really explore it, and explore the murky grey areas. This story isn’t really; it’s not a story of victimization; it’s so much more complicated than that. When I read the script, I was really struck by how Charles Randolph, the writer really did approach the conversation with all of its complexities. With incredibly complex characters. They feel very conflicted to me, and I am always attracted to characters with a strong inner conflict. STRIPLV: Tell us about your character Kayla Popisil. ROBBIE: Kayla Popisil is a fictional character, and that’s who I play. She left her local gig working on The Weather Channel in Orlando to work in New York City at Fox News. She at the beginning of the film is a low-level associate producer working for Gretchen Carlson then transitioning to working for Bill O’Reilly, where she works with associate producer Jess Carr played by Kate McKinnon, who I get to do a lot of my stuff with. She’s young; she is a millennial, an evangelical millennial which I loved that about her. And I think it was quite special to read a Christian character who wasn’t being made fun of. I feel like they are not really represented in pop culture. Evangelical millennials aren’t really represented in pop culture in an authentic way, I feel. If they a part of a project they are there for comic relief, they are either super naïve or super eager kind of like mocking them, and that wasn’t Charles’s approach with Kayla. STRIPLV: Tell us about each main character’s experience with sexual harassment in the film. ROBBIE: Nicole Kidman plays Gretchen Carlson, Charlize Theron plays Megan Kelly, and I play Kayla a fictional character, and they are three very different women. I think it would be oversimplifying it to categorize their experiences past present and future explorations of the central themes of the film. What I do think that we see how the story differentiates their experiences is Gretchen Nicole’s character is kind of like our moral center of the story. It is her choice that propels the story. I think Megan is our narrative center; she is our guide throughout the story. I think Kayla is meant to be the emotional center the person in which you live through the harassment and its effects. I think all three are crucial to the story. I think it’s not so easy to categorize these things and put them into boxes, but I think Gretchen is more kind of like gender bullying, Megan’s harassment was something that she went through and came out the other side but even stronger, and Kayla is experiencing it in real-time with the audience is experiencing it with her. It’s hard to fit them neatly into what they are, but that’s the best I can do, I suppose. (Laughing) STRIPLV: What was it like working with Charlize Theron as both a fellow actor and as the producer on the movie? ROBBIE: I look up to Charlize already. As an actress, and as a producer watching a badass actress, and watching a badass producer do her thing. And getting to see it first-hand now, it’s just wicked, and it’s so cool, and I am happy because she is just a real producer it’s not just a vanity title, she is there she is onset on days when she doesn’t need to be on set. Obviously, I am not privy to the preproduction schedule or the post-production schedule, but for the main production schedule, she is there, and that part I get to witness. You can tell that she has been ingrained in this process from the beginning. You can tell that she’s approached this project with the level of dedication that everyone on this project has. I don’t think you take on a subject like this lightly. And Charlize certainly hasn’t you can see the work. STRIPLV: What was it like working with Nicole Kidman? ROBBIE: My first day of acting, I actually got to do a scene with both John and Nicole. And seeing Nicole’s Gretchen, I was interested in seeing what that was going to be like because the whole point of Gretchen at this point in the script was that she was becoming unwatchable to her viewers. Yet, you’ve got Nicole the most watchable actress playing her. I was like, how is she going to find that balance? How does she stay true to the character and also make it a character worth spending time with? And then she starts acting, and you are like well that’s why she is Nicole Kidman. It was incredible. She has this x-factor. Same with Charlize, they have this presence that thing that makes you lean in as an audience member. STRIPLV: Can you tell us more about your character Kayla? ROBBIE: Kayla is a fictional character, but her experiences are an amalgamation of a number of women’s experiences at Fox News. And there were a lot of accounts both publicly and only shared with filmmakers that I was privy to. There was a lot I still had to understand about where she was coming from. How she was entering this institution with a level of trust and admiration that she was, and that came from her family and her upbringing. She’s grown up in a family that watches Fox News religiously, and I can only imagine the pressure she felt to make her family proud. And she is an ambitious woman. She feels like she has something to add to Fox. She feels like she needs to keep her career moving forward. There were things about her that I understood immediately, and there were things I didn’t understand about her. It was interesting to talk to Charles and Jay, who both interestingly enough grew up in families that watched Fox News as a lot of families do in America, so there was a lot I could understand through chats with them. I did research online. Twitter was a great tool following online conservative political millennial girls was a fascinating exercise. I started a twitter account and started following those accounts, and that was informative. And beyond that, I have my usual approach as an actor which I find an acting coach and a dialog coach and plot things out that way. STRIPLV: We heard this was a fast-paced film shoot, can you tell about what that was like? ROBBIE: We were shooting 360 Barry Akroyd our DP lit the set, so there wasn’t really set up time. There wasn’t go hang in the trailers, and whatever it was like when you were on set, you don’t stop until everyone wraps that day. Of course, on top of that, Charlize was obviously the producer and having to run around doing a million different things. Juggling this and making it all look seamless and elegant and amazing and powerful in every regard. But I think any off-set moments we had; I was just really getting advice from Nicole and Charlize. How do you do this? How do you deal with that? What do you do at this point in your career? I found both of them to be great mentors during this process. It was just nice to have bonding time. I would say. STRIPLV: What was your excitement level to work with this cast and crew on the film? ROBBIE: It’s like a dream to be able to work with this particular group and a huge ensemble of actors that I already admire and know and have watched for years. We all got to do this thing together; it was just incredible between Charlize, Nicole, and Kate, and John and countless others, the work was just truly inspiring. I am just grateful that I got to be a part of it. It’s about the women that took down one of the most powerful media moguls. STRIPLV: And 2020 is busy with a bevy of other movies, including Peter Rabbit 2, Ruin, and further forward, more Harley projects, Barbie and others. Are you tired? ROBBIE: No time to be tired. I do feel incredibly motivated and completely inspired to do something special over the next couple of years. I don’t think I can work at this pace indefinitely, so there will certainly come a time when I have to slow down, just not yet.