Margot Robbie admits to ‘pressure’ concerns over Barbie role

Barbie, starring Margot Robbie in the lead role, is finally being released this Friday (21 July).

The live-action film based on the popular Mattel doll has been in production since 2009, and in that time, has gone through several changes in writer and director.

At one stage, Amy Schumer and Anne Hathaway were both in talks to star, but that changed when Robbie stepped in.

Before the actor was cast in the lead role, she was attached as a producer and pitched the film to Warner Bros Pictures, who ultimately acquired it from Sony after some hustling from the Wolf of Wall Street actor.

She told Collider in a new interview: “I think I told them that it’d make a billion dollars, which maybe I was overselling, but we had a movie to make, OK?”

However, Robbie shared her one condition for producing the film before the role of Barbie had been cast.

“I didn’t want whoever our director was going to be – Greta [Gerwig] being the first choice, but if she had said no – I didn’t want our director to feel pressured to put me in the role.

“So I was just really upfront about like, ‘I won’t be offended in the slightest. We could go to anyone. Whatever story you want to tell and whoever you want that to be, I support that. I’ve got skin in the game as a producer, I don’t have skin in the game as an actor, so be free with that choice.’

Fortunately for Robbie, Gerwig told her, ‘Shut up, I want to write this for you.’” But Robbie was initially unconvinced: “I was like, ‘You might feel pressured to say that, but …’ and we did that dance for a while. And then eventually I just accepted that she did want me to play the role, and then she wrote it.”

From that point on, Robbie and her co-star Ryan Gosling’s names were written into the script, with Gerwig co-wrote with her husband, the director Noah Baumbach (Marriage Story).

Barbie, also starring Ryan Gosling, Simu Liu and Michael Cera, is projected to make more than $100m at the box office in its opening weekend.

Its biggest rival comes in the form of Christopher Nolan’s biographical drama Oppenheimer, starring Irish actor Cillian Murphy, which is projected to make $50m. Both films are receiving rave reviews.

Find live updates ahead of both films’ releases here.