Her appeal is only half the story

Who is Margot Robbie? The easy answer to that question is: a 26-year-old Australian actress whose big break came three years ago playing Naomi LaPaglia, Leonardo DiCaprio’s impossibly glamorous wife in The Wolf of Wall Street. But poke around beyond that, and things get a little misty.

Turn to an instantly notorious Vanity Fair profile published recently, and you’ll learn, among other tidbits, that she is “tall but only with the help of certain shoes”, perhaps in the same way that she has a trunk, but only with the help of certain elephant costumes.

Robbie is also “beautiful”, the magazine observed, “but in a minor knock-around key, a blue mood, a slow dance” — a much-quoted line when the piece received the piranha treatment on social media.

So, why is it — after three almost three years in the direct sunlight of movie-stardom, during which she became the most talked-about and gazed-at young actress in Hollywood — does Robbie still leave writers and critics floundering?

Part of the reason is that we don’t yet know what a Margot Robbie film looks like. While she’s played alongside DiCaprio, Will Smith and Alexander Skarsgard, she’s always been a co-star, support act or glamorous assistant.

In the recent DC Comics ensemble romp Suicide Squad, Robbie — who plays Harley Quinn, a criminal psychologist-turned-psychopathic Joker protégé — is unquestionably primus inter pares among her co-stars, which puts her breakneck rise into sobering perspective.

When I interviewed her in late 2013, just before the release of The Wolf of Wall Street, she told me breathlessly how she’d recently sped halfway around the world for a once-a-lifetime audition with Will Smith. Two years later, by the time that film, Focus, was released, she and Smith had equal billing — and now, her Harley Quinn is upstaging his Deadshot in every last scrap of Suicide Squad promotional material Warner Bros has managed to crank out. Her roles to date suggest she’s a free spirit with boundless confidence and a lip-biting love of mischief — what other kind of unknown actress could bound from a cancelled TV series to stealing Martin Scorsese’s best film in more than a decade? But in person she struck me as a pragmatist and strategist.

She spoke about “getting her ducks lined up” during her stint on Neighbours, which meant acquiring a dialogue coach, an agent with strong LA connections, a business manager and publicists on either side of the Atlantic.

What’s more, this ‘team’, as she calls them, knows just how high her ambitions run. “I’d rather do two scenes in a Terrence Malick film than every scene in a mediocre film,” she once told the Sydney Morning Herald. “The team has always been on the same page.”

Yet she’s a very different kind of performer from the other Australia-raised actresses who’ve thrived under similar circumstances — foremost among them Cate Blanchett, Nicole Kidman and Naomi Watts.  This guild of Australian master emoters are the kind of stars that articulate complex, often contradictory currents of feeling with heart-shattering clarity. It’s hard to picture Robbie doing any of that, and not just because no script has yet afforded the opportunity to do so. Instead, she’s playing up to a kind of movie star image we haven’t really seen since the early 1990s, and perhaps didn’t realise how much we missed.

Robbie offers a wry Aussie take on the all-American sharpened sex symbol: think Michelle Pfeiffer, Sharon Stone, Kim Basinger, and more recently Cameron Diaz. Tellingly, when Robbie first flew into Hollywood in early 2011 for two months of back-to-back auditions for forthcoming TV projects, one of the shows she tried out for was ABC’s Charlie’s Angels reboot, the 2000 film version of which had boosted Diaz’s own career up a tier or two.

Like Pfeiffer, Stone and Basinger, Robbie glints with a combustible mix of talent, beauty and drive you imagine were simply too much for whatever small town you assume she grew up in. The drive part, at least, lives up to the fantasy: her break on Neighbours came after she bombarded the casting director with phone calls.

Nevertheless, those looks mean she often plays a prize for leading men. Her eye-catching international screen debut came in the Richard Curtis rom-com About Time as Charlotte. And when her character in The Wolf of Wall Street first sheds her clothes for DiCaprio’s smirking stockbroker Jordan Belfort, her naked body glints like polished gold. The scene was shot at 9 am, but when a crew member offered her a little Dutch courage, she accepted. “Acting 101,” she joked later. “Three shots of tequila and you’ll be fine.” But even her less-admired roles — a biddable peasant lass in Suite Française, a man-eating war correspondent in Whiskey Tango Foxtrot, and the apex of a post-apocalyptic love triangle in Z for Zachariah — still centre on her desirability.

She’s self-deprecatingly described her look as “more ‘toothpaste model’ than artsy”. Perhaps that’s why in September 2014 she founded her own production company, LuckyChap Entertainment, among whose inaugural projects are a biopic of the disgraced Olympic skater Tonya Harding. And she’s reconnecting with Gleeson, too: the twosome will co-star in the forthcoming AA Milne biopic Goodbye Christopher Robin, with Robbie as the Winnie-the-Pooh creator’s wife, Daphne.