The Mighty Harley Quinn: An Interview With Margo Robbie

It has been nearly a month since author Rich Cohen wrote an embarrassingly pervy profile of actress Margot Robbie in Vanity Fair, which reduced the talented actress to her ability to look “Tall but only with the help of certain shoes,” and to “be sexy and composed even while naked but only in character.” It was an example of the objectification that Robbie has found herself fighting in Hollywood, where her beauty and her role as a seductive golddigger in The Wolf Of Wall Street has prevented several directors from taking her seriously as an actress.

Robbie isn’t taking these narrow-minded casting decisions lying down. As well as setting up her own production company, LuckyChap Entertainment, she has fought to play a diverse range of women, all flawed and strong in equal measure. And it’s working – as well as acting in Whiskey Tango Foxtrot, The Big Short and Z For Zachariah, this summer she’s starring in two blockbusters, The Legend Of Tarzan and the highly anticipated Suicide Squad, where she plays fan favourite Harley Quinn.

“I always wanted to play different roles,” says the 26-year-old Australian. “I never want to do the same thing, because I don’t think I’m going to learn anything or grow as an actor by resting on my laurels. And you do need to convince people that you’re capable of doing something different. I remember doing The Wolf Of Wall Street and it took a lot of convincing then to get the role in Z For Zachariah, it was a lot harder to get that part than a lot of my other roles in bigger films, but they were like ‘No, she can’t do that.’ People are very happy to cast you as something they’ve seen before, and very trepidatious to cast you as something they haven’t seen you pull off.”

It was this desire that led her to audition for the role of Jane in David Yates’ The Legend Of Tarzan – only because this iteration of Jane is no damsel in distress.
“Jane and I definitely share some similarities,” nods Robbie. “I think female audiences in 2016 will be able to relate to her as well. The way she reacts to situations is great. Like, if I was in a situation I didn’t want to be in, I wouldn’t just sit there and wait for someone else to fix it. I’d start figuring out a way to fix it myself, which she does too.”
It’s perhaps no surprise then that Robbie enjoyed her intense interactions with Christoph Waltz in Tarzan. Waltz, known for his unpredictability and mercurial attitude both on and off-screen, played Robbie’s kidnapper in Tarzan, and the actors enjoyed playing with the adversarial nature of their characters’ relationship.

“We all know that Christoph approaches his characters in an unpredictable way,” says Robbie. “He approached this very similarly, in that he didn’t play an archetypal villain. He was kind of a bizarre character, which made it so much more fun and interesting, not just for me but for the character of Jane, who is also trying to figure him out. I was really excited by the idea of getting to work with Christoph because he’s such an incredible actor, but I also loved the dynamic between his character and Jane, where we as the actors and characters were working like a game of chess, trying to figure each other out and predict three moves ahead.”

This embracing of intensity acted as good training to enter the mindset of Harley Quinn in David Ayer’s anti-hero comic book movie Suicide Squad. Harley Quinn is an effervescent, acrobatic lunatic, cheerfully quipping as she causes death and destruction – and this violence spills over into her abusive relationship with Jared Leto’s Joker.
“Ironically, that’s the thing I most struggled to crack with the character,” reveals Robbie. “She has this amazing sense of humour; she’s so strong and so smart, but then she’s always falling to pieces over this guy. I created a very intricate backstory for Harley that helped justify why she does the things she does.

“Since Harley is a psychiatrist – she was Dr. Harleen Quinzel before she met and fell for Mr. J – a big part of that process was researching criminal minds and mental illness, and what gave me the most insight into her was codependence. In my research I discovered that it feels like a compulsion, like a kind of addiction. Once I viewed it from that perspective, I had a world of empathy for Harley and could justify almost any of her actions.  That was really the key to unlocking the character for me.” And just as Robbie connected with Harley through her flaws, so too are audiences flocking to see this blackly comic action flick about super villains.

“I think it has to do with the fact that they’re not perfect,” says Robbie. “They have so many flaws and personal issues but, weirdly enough, I think that’s what makes them so relatable.”