While Oppenheimer wiped the floor at last week’s Golden Globes, winning five awards, Barbie – the other half of the summer’s #Barbenheimer phenomenon – had to make do with just a single, newfangled gong.
And one that, according to some, was only created this year as a consolation prize for the plastic-fantastic movie.
However, in carrying off the ‘cinematic and box office achievement’ award after having won more nominations than any other film, one Barbie star surely had the last laugh.
Step forward Margot Robbie – who didn’t just play the iconic doll made flesh, but her company, LuckyChap, produced the movie too.
As a result, she earned an estimated $50 million from her acting and producing salaries, plus box office bonuses. The film has so far grossed more than $1.4 billion.
It doesn’t end there.
Less well-known is the fact that the 33-year-old n star also produced another of this award season’s most talked-about films: Saltburn.
While Oppenheimer wiped the floor at last week’s Golden Globes , winning five awards, Barbie – the other half of the summer’s #Barbenheimer phenomenon – had to make do with just a single, newfangled gong.
However, in bagging the ‘cinematic and box office achievement’ award after having won more nominations than any other film, one Barbie star surely had the last laugh. Step forward Margot Robbie – who didn’t just play the iconic doll made flesh, but her company, LuckyChap, produced the movie too. As a result, she earned an estimated $50 million.
It doesn’t end there. Less well-known is the fact that the n screen siren also produced another of this award season’s most acclaimed films: Saltburn.
The psychological thriller starring Irish actor Barry Keoghan and new Hollywood heartthrob Jacob Elordi has earned an army of fans for its shocking sexual content, and gruesome twists and turns.
Certainly, dark and disturbing Saltburn couldn’t be further removed from the sunny, camp world of Barbie – except that both were directed by women (Emerald Fennell and Greta Gerwig respectively) as part of Robbie’s self-proclaimed post-MeToo mission to address the gender imbalance in Hollywood.
Both productions are also testament to the meteoric rise of Robbie as a Hollywood power player to seemingly unstoppable heights.
Indeed, Robbie, who this month revealed she wants to add directing to her busy resume, has proved herself to be considerably more than ‘the hottest blonde ever’ –as her character was described in the script for The Wolf of Wall Street, the 2013 Martin Scorsese blockbuster that provided her breakout role.
Intentionally or not, however, she does appear to be emulating another golden-haired actress turned business-owner: Legally Blonde star Reese Witherspoon.
Worth an estimated $440 million, Witherspoon became Hollywood’s richest actress in 2021 after her production company, Hello Sunshine – in which she owned a 40 percent stake – was sold for a staggering $900 million.
Like Robbie’s LuckyChap, Hello Sunshine aimed to tell female-driven stories, and often had Witherspoon both producing and starring in a string of successful movies and TV shows including Big Little Lies, The Morning Show, and Where the Crawdads Sing.
Although Robbie’s estimated net worth is some way behind at $60 million, there’s no reason why she shouldn’t prove to be even more successful with this joint acting/producing winning formula.
Robbie, who this month revealed she wants to add directing to her fulsome resume, has proved herself to be considerably more than ‘the hottest blonde ever’.
After all, at 47, Witherspoon is 14 years Robbie’s senior and hasn’t starred in a big movie since 2018.
In other words, Robbie has more than enough time to steal the crown as Hollywood’s money-making queen.
It seems an impossible achievement for a woman who claims she only broke into acting 16 years ago because someone answered her phone call by mistake.
The third of four children whose parents divorced when she was five, Robbie was raised by her Scottish-born mother, Sarie, a physiotherapist, on ‘s Gold Coast.
As a child she was fiercely independent, insisting on making her own lunch. Precociously business-savvy, she would steal her brother’s toys and sell them at the side of the road.
Although she always loved film, Robbie, who enjoyed surfing and boar hunting, has said she never dreamt of becoming an actress.
She changed her mind in her teens, describing how, on the advice of an agent, she would phone a TV production company every day looking for work.
One day, she says, she was put through by accident to the casting director of the popular n soap Neighbours, who just happened to be looking for an actress of Robbie’s age.
After a three-year stint on Neighbours – a TV institution which also launched the careers of Russell Crowe, Liam Hemsworth and Kylie Minogue – she moved to LA in 2011 to make it big.
In 2013, she bagged her role as Leonardo DiCaprio’s wife in The Wolf Of Wall Street after reportedly improvising an unscripted slap to the actor’s cheek during her audition.
After a three-year stint on Neighbours (pictured) – a TV institution which also launched the careers of Russell Crowe, Liam Hemsworth and Kylie Minogue – she moved to LA.
In 2013, she bagged her role as Leonardo DiCaprio’s wife in The Wolf Of Wall Street after reportedly improvising an unscripted slap to the actor’s cheek during her audition.
Robbie then relocated to London the following year after making Suite Francaise, a romantic war drama, in France. During filming she got on so well with four of the UK-based crew that, after getting drunk together at the London premiere of The Wolf of Wall Street, they decided to all live together in the city.
After agreeing on a location that the lowest-paid of them could afford (and that certainly wasn’t Robbie), they found a ramshackle four-bed apartment in South London which they nicknamed The Manor, and where Robbie reportedly made everyone get the same ‘house tattoo’.
The determinedly unstarry Robbie later described these ‘student life’ days of heavy drinking in local pubs and summer picnics as ‘the best days of my life’.
They might also have been the luckiest. For it was then that Robbie and three of her roommates – including Tom Ackerley, who later became her husband – decided to go into business together and set up LuckyChap.
But it was Robbie – then only 24 – who was the driving force behind the project.
LuckyChap is now based in Los Angeles – as are Robbie and Ackerley, who have traded in their grimy rental for a palatial $5million Venice Beach mansion.
The couple still remain focused on making content that – according to some critics – has a relentlessly feminist flavor. And it’s not something that has always worked at the box office.
Not wanting to waste the company’s chief asset, LuckyChap’s movies and TV shows also inevitably have a strong Margot Robbie flavor, with the actress often taking the lead role.
Robbie played disgraced figure skater Tonya Harding in LuckyChap’s first theatrical release – I, Tonya – in 2017, before transforming into comic-book character Harley Quinn in the 2020 action movie Birds of Prey.
Robbie then relocated to London the following year. She lived in a ramshackle four-bed apartment in South London, nicknamed The Manor, and where Robbie reportedly made everyone get the same ‘house tattoo’. (Pictured: Robbie, in ‘Oscars Bait’ t-shirt, in London).
LuckyChap is now based in Los Angeles – as are Robbie and husband Tom Ackerley (pictured), who have traded in their grimy rental for a palatial $5million Venice Beach mansion.
Robbie played disgraced figure skater Tonya Harding in LuckyChap’s first theatrical release – I, Tonya – in 2017.
In 2020, she transformed into comic-book character Harley Quinn in the action movie Birds of Prey.
Endlessly energetic, Robbie is said to be ‘intensely involved’ in each production – even those not starring her – vetting scripts and keen to watch everything that’s shot.
Even famous co-stars such as Charlize Theron have admitted to being somewhat intimidated by her.
Future LuckyChap projects will no doubt continue to balance the worthy – such as a series of modern adaptations of Shakespeare plays told from female perspectives and made by an all-female production team – with the crowd-pleasing, such as a hotly-anticipated prequel of the 2001 Las Vegas casino robbery caper Ocean’s Eleven (in which Robbie will delight fans by reuniting with her Barbie’s ‘Ken’, Ryan Gosling).
But no matter how ingenious their on-screen characters, it’s seems unlikely that even the most accomplished Vegas thieves could nab anything like what Robbie is putting away in the bank.