Hello, Barbie!

It’s the movie of the summer, and the role Margot Robbie was born to play. Or not exactly—as Abby Aguirre discovers on a roller-skating, ice-cream playdate with Hollywood’s most indomitable heroine

- By Abby Aguirre. Photographeb by Ethan James

Margot Robbie wasn’t a Barbie fanatic as a child. She’s not even sure she owned a Barbie. “I don’t think I did,” she tells me one morning over breakfast in Venice Beach. “I know my cousin had a bunch of Barbies, and I’d go to her house.” Growing up on Australia’s Gold Coast, Robbie spent a lot of time outside. She and her cousin would make mud pies. They’d play with trucks. And they’d play with Barbies. Mostly they ’d build forts, “cubbies” to an Australian. “Building cubbies was what we did all day, every day.”

We are a couple of blocks from the Venice boardwalk, at Great White, an Australian-owned restaurant, and I have asked Robbie what compelled her to produce and star in a liveaction Barbie movie, due out this July. “It wasn’t that I ever wanted to play Barbie, or dreamt of being Barbie, or anything like that,” the 32-year-old actor says. “This is going to sound stupid, but I really didn’t even think about playing Barbie until years into developing the project.”

It doesn’t sound stupid but it does seem counterintuitive, the notion that Robbie, whose breakout role in The Wolf of Wall Street was described in that movie’s script as “the hottest blonde ever,” was not envisioning herself in the role of Barbie when she sought the film rights from Mattel. And yet the person sitting across the table is not giving blonde bombshell. Not in a conventional sense, anyway.