Film

Margot Robbie Agrees That The Gross Vanity Fair Profile Was “Really Weird”

"You see what happens when you mess with Australia?"

by Sinead Stubbins  26 July 2016

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A few weeks ago, Vanity Fair ran a profile about Margot Robbie that read like a list a reasons why middle-aged writer Rich Cohen wanted to have sex with her. In it Cohen described Robbie as as “a slow dance” who can be can be “sexy and composed even while naked but only in character”, whatever that means. He also made the baffling decision to describe Australia as a land forgotten by progress and time, where people use the time difference to study the American way of life as they sleep.

“Australia is America 50 years ago, sunny and slow, a throwback, which is why you go there for throwback people,” Rich said. “They still live and die with the plot turns of soap operas in Melbourne and Perth, still dwell in a single mass market in Adelaide and Sydney. In the morning, they watch Australia’s Today show. In other words, it’s just like America, only different.”

Oh boy, it was a cracker. Even though Margot Robbie was silent as the outrage over the profile raged on around her, last night on The Project she did admit that the story made her feel a bit weird. “I remember thinking, ‘That was a really odd interview, I don’t know how that’s going to come out’,” she told Carrie Bickmore.

“And I read it and I went, ‘Yeaaah, the tone of this is really weird. I don’t really know what he’s trying to get at or play at’. But I didn’t expect there to be like an uproar about it at all.”

Robbie was very diplomatic about the creepy sex profile, because in reality she probably needs to keep the powerful people who run powerful publications like Vanity Fair onside. Sadly she admitted that she has read “far more offensive, far more sexist, insulting, derogatory, disgusting things on a daily basis” so she thinks she might be “desensitised to it now”. Such is the reality of being a young woman in Hollywood, that you inevitably have to put up with craggy old lechers rating your body parts before asking what movie you’re in.

She did however mention that she was heartened by the intense reaction to the profile. “I did have a bit of Aussie pride like, ‘Don’t mess with the Aussies’,” she said. “You see what happens when you mess with Australia?”