In case you weren’t aware, Margot Robbie usually has a surefire way to connect with her characters, but it didn’t work this time. According to a feature in Entertainment Weekly from earlier this year, Robbie uses animals as inspiration. For her role as Tonya Harding in “I, Tonya,” she brought the physicality of a pitbull to the character … but whenever Tonya got onto the ice and started skating, she channeled a graceful mustang. As Nellie in “Babylon,” Robbie’s character had to fight a snake, and she watched videos of honey badgers fighting the reptiles to get a feel for the character. However, as she told Murphy, that didn’t click for her when it came to her role as Barbie.
“It was so weird prepping Barbie as a character,” Robbie said. “All my usual tools didn’t apply for this character. I work with an acting coach, and I work with a dialect coach, and I work with a movement coach, and I read everything, and I watch all the things. I rely on animal work a lot. I was maybe 45 minutes into pretending to be a flamingo or whatever, and I was suddenly like, ‘It’s not working.'”
