Patriarchy hasn’t been an issue for Margot Robbie and husband Tom Ackerley, her longtime partner and co-producer of Barbie.
Barbie and Ken’s power dynamic remains a work in progress. As for Margot Robbie and Tom Ackerley’s partnership…
Well, that’s the stuff dreams are made of.
“I was the ultimate single gal,” Robbie reflected to Vogue in 2016 about her bygone bachelorette days. “The idea of relationships made me want to vomit. And then this crept up on me. We were friends for so long. I was always in love with him, but I thought, ‘Oh, he would never love me back. Don’t make it weird, Margot. Don’t be stupid and tell him that you like him.'”
Nor did she push Ackerley around or take him for granted.
“And then it happened,” Robbie continued, “and I was like, ‘Of course we’re together. This makes so much sense, the way nothing has ever made sense before.'”
Not enough can be said about the importance of being on the same page—sometimes literally, in their case.
Having decided in 2018 that Hollywood’s long-gestating Barbie movie was the perfect project for LuckyChap Entertainment, the production company Robbie and Ackerley co-founded with friends Josey McNamara and Sophia Kerr, Robbie enlisted Greta Gerwig to write the script.
The 33-year-old Australian and her English husband of six years read the screenplay by Gerwig and partner Noah Baumbach at the same time and were similarly gobsmacked by page one.
“We just looked at each other, pure panic on our faces,” Robbie told Vogue ahead of Barbie’s July 21 release. “We were like, Holy fucking s–t. I think the first thing I said to Tom was, This is so genius. It is such a shame that we’re never going to be able to make this movie.”
Long story short and $774.5 billion at the global box office later, there is much to celebrate in the Robbie-Ackerley household.
They first met in 2013 when Ackerley served as third assistant director on the WWII-era romance Suite Française and Robbie had a supporting role. She bonded with him and several other ADs, and when she rolled back through London to do press for Wolf of Wall Street early the next year, they all decided to get a place together.
It was while sharing a three-bedroom house in Clapham with five roommates, including future business partners Kerr (Robbie’s mate since childhood) and McNamara (second AD on Suite Française), that Ackerley and Robbie’s friendship quickly blossomed into more.
But they kept it a secret at first, Robbie later told The Guardian, “because we weren’t really taking it seriously.”
