Margot Robbie

What’s this Aussie superstar’s secret? Beneath that bombshell exterior and the leading-lady charisma beats the heart of an actors’ actor, threading every role with humor and humanity

- Seth Plattner

 It all started with a stiletto. Specifically, a red pump, digging into Leonardo DiCaprio’s face in Martin Scorsese’s 2013 Oscar nominated opus, The Wolf of Wall Street. In the pivotal scene, DiCaprio’s notorious New York stockbroker, Jordan Belfort, crawls across the carpet toward his wife, Naomi, groveling for forgiveness for his infidelity. But Naomi—played to power sex-kitten perfection by Margot Robbie—is having none of it.

“I didn’t really get much direction from Marty the whole shoot,” says Robbie, 27, who made her acting debut as a teenager, on the Aussie soap Neighbours, before moving to Los Angeles and almost instantly landing a lead in ABC’s 2011 short-lived drama, Pan Am. “Our job was to find the character and to rise to the occasion. If we didn’t, we weren’t going to be in the film that much.”

And rise she did: The “Who’s that girl?” reverberating across America quickly became “Now that’s a movie star,” as Robbie lit up one role after another with grit, humor, and a healthy dose of sex appeal. After Wolf, she proved glamorous wasn’t her only mode with the 2015 indie Z for Zachariah, playing Ann, an innocent farm girl whose post apocalyptic life is upended when two mysterious men (Chiwetel Ejiofor and Chris Pine) enter her world. That same year, Focus saw Robbie free her inner femme fatale as a con artist going game-for-game with Will Smith. In 2016, Whiskey Tango Foxtrot took her—and costar Tina Fey—to Afghanistan as intrepid war reporters.