Margot Robbie is becoming a bit disagreeable. Deliberately.
She graduated from soap opera actor in her native Australia to global movie star in 2014 with her first major role in a feature, hilariously intimidating an overmatched Leonardo DiCaprio in Martin Scorsese’s hit “The Wolf of Wall Street.” Her sidesplitting turn as a sociopathic investment hustler’s glamorous, shrewd and stronger-than-expected spouse won raves as a smutty, funny standout.
Robbie has been impressing fans, critics and film studios ever since by playing quirky, formidable, not entirely admirable women. She has had ambitious turns as Will Smith’s larcenous love interest in the dark crime comedy “Focus” and as the flirtatious DC Comics supervillain Harley Quinn in “Suicide Squad,” a role rumored to have launched her toward reprising the role in several spinoff films.
She’s now in theaters as Daphne Milne in “Goodbye Christopher Robin,” playing the wife of popular English author A.A. Milne and mother of the boy who inspired his Winnie-the-Pooh novels. The movie, which opened Friday, follows the family in the years between World War I and World War II. Daphne is a socialite with a fair degree of wit but no gift for the dull duties of home.
She repeatedly leaves her husband and son in the English countryside to return to the high life in London. She is essentially a visitor until she is drawn back by a degree of late-arriving maturity — not to mention Pooh’s surprising popular and financial success. Robbie takes a character that could be purely alienating and relentlessly selfish and makes her flamboyantly elegant and quite funny.
Daphne is partly based on the real person and partly a dramatic creation, Robbie said.
“There is not so much documentation on her as there is on Christopher Robin, obviously, and on A.A. Milne,” she said. “There is a book that the real Christopher Robin wrote as an adult that I was reading to help me adapt Daphne. Then I stopped reading it because his description of his mother was becoming more of a hindrance than a help.”
No firsthand experience
Although she’s worked professionally as an actor since she was 17, Robbie said she never had to deal with that sort of crush of publicity as a youth.
“I got to live out my childhood completely,” she said.
She moved from home on the family farm in Queensland to pursue acting in Melbourne “before becoming famous. So really my childhood, very outdoors, untouched by Hollywood, had a very clear end to it, and my adult life had a very clear beginning to it. I’m really fortunate it worked out that way.”
Robbie, 27, is in demand beyond her work on-screen. She has developed a deal with Warner Bros. to develop and produce female-centered feature films through her LuckyChap Entertainment production company. It has two films completed and ready for release and a third that she will star in beginning preproduction.
Source: startribune
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