From superhero blockbusters to award-winning dramas, Margot Robbie is one of the most exciting movie stars working today. But which performances stand out above the rest?
Margot Robbie is in a league of her own. In the decade since her stateside breakout performance in The Wolf of Wall Street, the native Australian has cemented herself as one of Hollywood’s most dependable actors. Robbie brings old-school star power to the modern era’s ubiquitous genres, turning in great performances in action blockbusters and historical dramas alike. She has a habit of effortlessly stealing the spotlight from her most famous costars while working with many of contemporary cinema’s most prominent directors, including Martin Scorsese, Quentin Tarantino, Adam McKay, Damien Chazelle, James Gunn, and Wes Anderson. Now, in light of her latest lead role in Greta Gerwig’s Barbie, here’s a list of Margot Robbie’s greatest roles so far.
10. Focus (2015)
This lighthearted crime thriller casts Robbie and future Suicide Squad costar Will Smith as dueling flirtatious con artists. Their sizzling romantic entanglement complicates the layers of duplicity and deception that their work requires, and Robbie playfully hides how much her character knows — it’s delightfully unclear whether she’s totally oblivious or a criminal mastermind with superb bluffing skills. She remains likable and commanding despite concealing a significant portion of her motivations and feelings. It’s a charming performance in a fun, breezy little movie.
9. Asteroid City (2023)
Robbie only has a few minutes of screen time in Wes Anderson’s latest film, Asteroid City, but her one-scene appearance is crucial to the story’s emotional climax. The film’s structure employs several levels of fiction, depicting a play within a play on a television program. Robbie portrays an actress who was cast as the deceased wife of Jason Schwartzman’s protagonist but was cut from the final version of the central play. Her character emotionally recites dialogue from her discarded scene to Schwartzman, elegantly embodying the film’s central thesis: We can find beauty and complex catharsis in the stories we create, even if they’re artificial and we don’t fully understand them.
8. Babylon (2022)
In Damien Chazelle’s ambitious but overcrowded Old Hollywood dramedy, Robbie plays rising star Nellie LaRoy, a volatile but talented actor resembling Clara Bow who struggles to transition to the sound era. Robbie’s movie star charisma is perfectly suited to playing, well, a movie star –– her magnetism and vulnerability ensure that we understand why people love Nellie on- and off-screen, even as she continually makes massive mistakes. Many of the movie’s best scenes hinge on Robbie’s strengths: In one, she surprises a film crew by instantaneously crying on camera; in another, she struggles to mask her simmering frustration with a shaky smile while shooting an infuriating scene with sound. She’s a notable live wire in a film plagued by excess, serving as one of the few agents of chaos that works for the story instead of against it.
7. Mary Queen of Scots (2018)
Robbie’s most physically transformative role came in Mary Queen of Scots, a historical drama in which she plays Queen Elizabeth I, caked in pale makeup and sporting stiff wigs that make you do a double take. It’s also some of her scariest work to date, playing a frigid, intimidating antagonist with sinister motivations. However, despite limited screen time, Robbie still ensures that Elizabeth is a complicated, confounding character, as her relationship with Saoirse Ronan’s Mary sometimes suggests a warm kinship below the conniving surface.
6. Bombshell (2019)
Robbie received her second Oscar nomination in Jay Roach’s drama Bombshell, which examines sexual harassment and abuse at Fox News circa the 2016 election. While costars Charlize Theron and Nicole Kidman play real figures (Megyn Kelly and Gretchen Carlson, respectively), Robbie portrays a composite of multiple people. She’s introduced as a bright-eyed, determined up and comer at Fox (Kate McKinnon’s character refers to her as “anchor Barbie,” inadvertently foreshadowing their next collaboration). As the film progresses, Robbie grows more visibly shaken, frightened, and reserved as her character endures more pain and abuse, and it’s one of her most convincing performances yet.
5. Birds of Prey (2020)
After the misfire of 2016’s Suicide Squad, Robbie got a better chance to shine in a spin-off revolving primarily around her character, Harley Quinn. Birds of Prey is a much stronger film overall, thanks in part to the consistency of her performance. Harley is one of the more difficult superhero characters to translate to live-action entertainment, as she was literally created for a cartoon children’s show. But Robbie toes the line nicely, giving the character a larger-than-life charisma without going too over the top. And the graceful physicality of her fight scenes makes Harley one of the most compelling visual combatants in modern superhero filmmaking, twirling and flipping between enemies with the precise elegance of a dancer.
4. Once Upon a Time in Hollywood (2019)
In Quentin Tarantino’s revisionist tribute to the Hollywood of his youth, Robbie plays Sharon Tate, whose quiet beauty and grace represents a kind of purity and innocence the world lost with the actress’s vicious murder in 1969. Robbie elegantly maintains the saintlike innocence the director clearly wants, but doesn’t portray her as an unknowable icon. Instead, she highlights the mundanity of a life cut short, casually running errands without drawing much attention to herself, except in a scene where she wants a little recognition at the cinema that’s playing her latest movie — and even there, she’s soft-spoken and gentle.
It’s a tricky performance, which relies on the audience’s prior understanding of Sharon Tate to assign significance to the character’s seemingly insignificant everyday life. And it’s a wonderful testament to Robbie’s star power, as it’s inexplicably entertaining to see her silently walk around and watch movies.
3. The Wolf of Wall Street (2013)
Robbie’s American breakthrough came via playing Naomi, the vivacious young wife of Jordan Belfort (Leonardo DiCaprio) in Martin Scorsese’s tragicomedy white collar crime epic. The protagonist’s preposterous rise and fall is easiest to track through the eyes of his love interest; their relationship begins with a ridiculous but believable flurry of lust and infatuation, then quickly avalanches into a mess of coked-up excess and abuse that justifiably turns Naomi away from her husband. Her heightened Brooklyn accent perfectly suits the exaggerated nature of the character and also serves as a warm-up for a similar voice she later employs as Harley Quinn.
2. Barbie (2023)
It’s a role that feels tailor-made for Robbie, not just for her physical likeness to a “Stereotypical Barbie” (lean, blonde, beautiful), but for her ability to subvert those traits while still embodying them. This Barbie begins her hero’s journey to escape the horrors of existential dread and cellulite, only to discover how the real world chews women up and spits them out, as highlighted in an effective monologue by her human playmate, a frustrated yet inspired America Ferrera.
But during Barbie’s epiphany about the paradox of patriarchal standards, the narrator breaks the fourth wall, pointing out the irony of having one of the most conventionally attractive and successful A-list actresses meditate on feeling like she isn’t enough. But Robbie’s casting remains perfect because her stereotype can’t live up the stereotype — no one can. She carries director Greta Gerwig’s common themes of girlhood, independence, and displacement while still maintaining the essence of Barbie’s idealized doll, no small feat for any actor, but Robbie once again, sticks the landing.
1. I, Tonya (2017)
Robbie’s turn as infamous figure skater Tonya Harding earned the actress her first Oscar nomination. It’s one of her most multifaceted performances to date — at some points, Robbie’s Tonya is funny, intense, and commanding, but at other junctures, she’s deadly serious and fragile. The film also displays one of the actress’s greatest strengths: Like the unconventional New Hollywood stars of the 1970s, such as Robert De Niro and Dustin Hoffman, Robbie is unafraid to portray complicated, unlikable characters who deal in moral shades of gray. She plays Harding with a balance of ferocity and sympathy that constantly challenges your allegiance to her character and successfully complicates the legacy of a figure who most people dismiss as the villain of a puzzling scandal. And it remains her greatest performance to date.
