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Secret Details Of Margot Robbie’s Barbie Performance Revealed By Director-TGN

Summary

  • Margot Robbie’s portrayal of Barbie is praised by director Greta Gerwig for capturing the challenge of portraying a character whose interior originally matches her exterior.

  • Barbie’s life in Barbie Land lacks realistic depth, as reflected in her environment and the objects around her.

  • As Barbie discovers the realities of the real world, the line between the two worlds blurs, and Robbie’s performance effectively conveys this transformation.

Margot Robbie’s performance in Barbie has been broken down by director Greta Gerwig, who also co-wrote the movie. The smash hit Barbie stars Robbie as the titular iconic doll, who travels to the real world when she discovers that her life in Barbie Land is no longer as perfect as she originally thought. The star-studded cast of the movie also includes Ryan Gosling, Will Ferrell, Simu Liu, America Ferrera, Issa Rae, Michael Cera, Helen Mirren, Rhea Perlman, and many more.

Gerwig appeared on a recent episode of the Ringer podcast The Big Picture to discuss everything about the Barbie movie. During their conversation, she discussed how difficult portraying Barbie was, because in the beginning “her interior life is completely continuous with her exterior life.” Gerwig revealed that the character only came together because of Robbie’s “deft” performance, crafting a character out of someone who doesn’t necessarily even know what her own personality is yet. Read Gerwig’s full quote below:

I think about the work Margot did as an actor, because really at the beginning of the movie, she doesn’t have any desires (or) interior life at all. Her interior life is completely continuous with her exterior life. There’s no distinction, really, between her and her environment. That’s a really hard thing to figure out how to do as an actor. She’s not vapid, she’s not stupid, but she’s not alive… She’s got to activate it somehow and act it.

It was finding a sort of purity of… being that she accessed which was so different and it’s… effect comes off as innocent, but it’s something even more extreme than that. And then she lets that sort of disintegrate and get complicated and polluted and changed as she goes. And it’s such an incredibly deft performance.

The truth is, I really only understand it by how she did it. Her realizing it in herself and us working on it together was how… If she hadn’t done it, I don’t think I would have understood it in quite the same way. She unlocked it and I felt like we sort of unlocked it together, but it was it was not obvious how to do it. And it’s deceptive. It’s almost deceptively simple, the way she’s gone about it, because it was a tricky one.

Barbie’s Life in Barbie Land Explained

As Gerwig says, Barbie is not vapid or stupid. However, she has never been challenged to look beyond the surfaces of things in Barbie Land. Because her world is essentially an alternate dimension that reflects the way children play with dolls, there typically isn’t anything beyond the surface.

Related: Is Barbie Land Imaginary & How It Connects To The Real World In The Barbie Movie

This emptiness is exemplified by Barbie Land’s beverage containers, which don’t contain any liquid and merely represent drinks. Most of the objects in Barbie Land operate similarly, including a swimming pool that is simply a blue plastic surface and cars that essentially operate on their own. When she travels to Los Angeles and has to quickly learn the rules that govern the real world, this marks the first time that she’s actually had to challenge her own notions of how life works.

During the movie, Barbie learns what it means to live in a representation of a perfect world rather than an actual perfect world. When she is exposed to the realities of life in Los Angeles, the line between the worlds begins to break down. However, it is contingent upon Robbie to reflect this in her own performance, as much of Barbie Land still seems superficially similar when she returns.