Margot Robbie almost immediately achieved A-list status after being cast in Martin Scorsese’s Wolf of Wall Street. But after doing the Oscar-winning feature, she made sure her next film role couldn’t have been any more different.
Margot Robbie was worried that she’d be stuck playing the same roles after ‘Wolf of Wall Street’
Robbie hit a big breakthrough by portraying Naomi in Martin Scorsese’s Wolf of Wall Street. But with how memorable the part became, she was weary of being typecast for similar roles. One of the reasons she started her production company was to maintain variety in her career.
“When I was trying to make my name as an actress, creative roles for women were limited,” she once told Harper’s Bazaar. “I didn’t want to pick up another script where I was the wife or the girlfriend— just a catalyst for the male story line. It was uninspiring.”
Robbie also set her sights on a very different movie than Wolf of Wall Street. She had the opportunity to star in the post-apocalyptic feature Z For Zachariah alongside Chris Pine and Chiwetel Ejiofor. The survivalist, introspective character she played in the film was a stark contrast from Naomi’s loud and colorful personality. She figured Zachariah would help lessen the chance of being typecast early.
“It was just written in a very interesting way, and [director] Craig Zobel has a very interesting way—almost seems like he kind of can manipulate his character onscreen, that’s how I felt at least about Compliance—so I was kind of intrigued to work with him and see how he would develop it. And it was so different than anything I had been doing; I wanted to prove myself in a different way than people were about to see in Wolf of Wall Street,” she once told Vogue.
She just had to get the role, and there was a moment where it seemed like she wouldn’t.
“I always wanted this role,” she said in a 2015 interview with Vulture. “I read this script a year and a half before I even became involved with the project, and then it went away, and then it went to someone else [Ed. note: Amanda Seyfreid]. Then the opportunity came up at the last minute, when I was literally just coming off Wolf, and I realized that I was going to be typecast really quickly, and I was like, ‘I don’t want to keep playing the same role that I was playing in Wolf.’ So when this came up again, I was like, ‘I’d kill to do that.’ And what a better time to do the complete opposite of what I’ve just been doing?”
Margot Robbie had to nail her hardest accent in ‘Z For Zachariah’
Zachariah helped further Robbie’s acting muscles by forcing her to adopt a new accent. She managed to mask her natural Australian accent in Wolf to sound more like a New Yorker. But she considered her Zachariah accent to be much more difficult than Wolf’s, as she had to take on a much subtler voice.
“Actually, Ann Burden’s accent in Z for Zachariah was by far the most difficult I had done—mainly because I had such little time to prepare for it,” she said. “I found out I got the role five days before we started shooting, and it’s a very specific accent. It’s not an accent that you hear often. There was no TV character I could associate with having an Appalachian accent. We decided that she was from Southwest Virginia, so that’s an incredibly specific place, and that’s an incredibly unique sound.”
Robbie turned to Youtube videos to get a reference for her accent.
“I just usually go on YouTube and find someone who’s from that area who posts video of themselves, and they just talk for ten minutes about rubbish. But with Z for Zachariah, there was a particular girl from Southwest Virginia on YouTube that I would listen to all day,” she said.
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