When Margot Robbie first read the script for “I, Tonya,” she assumed it was fiction.
“I thought, this writer is so kooky for coming up with all of this stuff!” the blond Australian actress, curled up comfortably in an armchair at Soho’s Crosby Street Hotel, tells The Post. “And then I realized it was a true story, and I was absolutely blown away.”
Robbie, 27, was only 4 years old when Olympic figure skater Nancy Kerrigan was kneecapped in January 1994, so she missed the worldwide obsession with the story of Tonya Harding, Kerrigan’s competitor and conspirator in the ill-conceived plot cooked up by her ex-husband and bodyguard to take down Kerrigan.
But as the film points out, there are a lot of things nobody knew about Harding, who went from Olympic athlete to global punchline in the wake of that crime. She had always been a misfit in the prim world of figure skating, setting records with her triple axel but mocked by judges for her trashy look, her potty mouth and her creepy ex-husband, Jeff Gillooly (played by Sebastian Stan), who ended up doing jail time for planning the assault on Kerrigan.
“I, Tonya,” on which Robbie is a producer along with her husband, Tom Ackerley, is based on interviews with all of its main players, and skates a fine line between comedy and drama. It mines some elements (like Gillooly’s mustache) for laughs while taking Harding’s hard-knocks upbringing seriously. The narrative, and its reliability, shifts around, not letting anyone off the hook: Robbie’s Harding is prone to whining straight to the camera about how things aren’t her fault.
Robbie says doing research for the part, especially watching a woman being turned into a national joke, was wrenching. “You can almost feel, in every interview, that she’s just waiting for someone to tear her apart,” Robbie says. “It’s painful to watch that.”
She says she avoided meeting Harding in person for a long time during production, preferring to work out her own take, and honing her own version of Harding’s smoke-tinged American accent. “There’s loads of archival footage, an endless amount of material. I wanted to see her as a character instead of replicating her as a person,” says the actress, who grew up in a farming family in Australia and got her start in Aussie indies and on the soap “Neighbours” before making a splash in the US in 2013’s “The Wolf of Wall Street.”
A week before shooting began, Robbie flew from her home in Los Angeles to Portland, Ore., to meet Harding in person. It went well: Harding was glad someone is finally telling her side of the story, warts and all. “She was incredibly understanding, more understanding than I could ever imagine being if someone made a movie about the most traumatic and triumphant moments of my life,” Robbie says.
‘You can almost feel, in every interview, that she’s just waiting for someone to tear her apart. It’s painful to watch that.’
As the film shows, Harding came from a working-class background, going from a home with an abusive single mother (played to Oscar-beckoning perfection by Allison Janney) to another with a violent spouse. “The domestic violence was probably our biggest concern, to get it right,” says Robbie. “It’s such a huge part of her story. After years of being abused, she felt desensitized to it. Getting hit wasn’t a shock because it happened every day.” (Harding’s mom, Sandy Golden, claims she was never abusive.)
To that end, Robbie developed a dark but effective working relationship with Stan. “We had an incredible atmosphere on set,” she says. “You could do anything your character would do, and the director wouldn’t call cut. So that meant a lot of our fights escalated. We improvised a lot. We knew how to push each other’s buttons: when to say something nice, when to say something cruel, when to poke at the other person in a vulnerable moment. It’s really hard to find that sort of relationship with a co-star, and we found it immediately. I feel like we just clicked.”
At one point, they clicked a little too much: “I got a bit carried away and hit Sebastian on the side of the head,” Robbie says. “He was very understanding. It’s great to have co-stars who go at it as hard as you do.”
Robbie went at it hard on the ice, too — to a point. “All the skating, dancing, the kicks, the spins — that’s me,” says Robbie, who trained for months. “Any of the big jumps is a skate double. No.1, insurance would never let me do it, and No.2, even if I had 10 years to train, I could not do those. No one could do the triple axel, so we had to CGI it. Only six women have ever done it since Tonya did it 25 years ago.”
Next up, Robbie hopes to resurrect the character that put her squarely on the map — supervillain Harley Quinn, the character many viewers found to be the heart of 2016’s “Suicide Squad.” “We are working very hard to make sure some iteration of Harley Quinn is back on screens, filming next year,” says Robbie, who is attached to “Gotham City Sirens,” a female-centric follow-up to “Suicide Squad” that is reportedly still in development. “I’ve been dying to get back into Harley ever since we wrapped. I was ready to keep playing her right then and there. I’m really trying to make it happen for next year.”
One reward for putting Harley on the mainstream map, says Robbie, was watching the character resonate through the culture. “I got a bit panicked when I first saw that young girls were dressing up as Harley for Halloween. I thought, ‘Oh God, how many mothers and fathers hate me because their 6-year-old daughters are running around in booty shorts with ripped stockings and tattoos on their faces?’ But the fact that there was a Halloween where the girl character was cooler than the guy character — so much so that even guys dressed up as Harley — made me so happy.”
She’s also a rumored contender for the upcoming Quentin Tarantino movie set in the late 1960s and 1970s. Robbie’s name has been linked to the role of Charles Manson murder victim Sharon Tate. “I adore Tarantino, I’m a humongous Tarantino fan,” says Robbie, “and if that happens — it’s not official — but if it did happen, I would be the happiest girl in the world. So please cross your fingers for me.”
Right now, though, she’s focused on all things Tonya — and crossing her fingers that people come away from it with a little more empathy. “The point of the movie was never to say she was a victim or she was a villain,” says Robbie. “It was just to show that she was a person. That’s what we were hoping to achieve. Not for people to think she’s perfect. Just to care for a moment, to feel what she felt, to some small degree.”
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