Margot Robbie has played a huge part in bringing Harley Quinn to life on the big screen, but also in bringing together the upcoming Birds of Prey film. According to a profile in Variety, Robbie was very involved with coming up with story ideas for the film and worked on story cards.
Honestly, it has been amazing watching Robbie rise into a powerful figure in Hollywood, all without even cracking 30 years old yet. When I think about her first major role in Wolf of Wall Street and how hyper-sexualized she was, I worried then that her whole career would be like that. While there have been roles that definitely take advantage of her looks, films like I, Tonya and Mary Queen of Scotts have shown her to be a multifaceted performer, and with her production company, she can make the kind of films that allow women to be nuanced, like Harley Quinn.
“I want to play that character, but it’s a guy — how do I self-generate?” Josey McNamara explains about Robbie’s thinking in the article. McNamara, along with Robbie, her husband Tom Ackerley, and their mutual friend, Sophia Kerr, run the production company LuckyChap Entertainment.
“But also,” McNamara continued, “she was at a place in her career where she had the ability to set up a company, and wanted to support other female creatives and give them the platform she was getting herself.”
Plus, after making three movies with male directors, they wanted to work with women, which led to the production of Birds of Prey. As you may recall, the movie stars multiple female characters, but is also written (Christina Hodson), directed (Cathy Yan), and produced (Robbie and Sue Kroll) by women, two of them (Hudson and Yan) women of color.
For Robbie, according to Hodson, the thing she wanted most was for Harley to have a group of female friends. “She really wanted to see Harley with girlfriends, Harley in a girl gang. Harley is such a naturally sociable character. And I think there was just a general longing to see girls together on screen — women being friends.”
The fact that she is not just self-generating for herself, but also for the other people involved, is so important and honorable. While I do have my own nerd wishes for the movie, after watching the Harley Quinn series on DC Universe, I am so excited to see what they do with this character in the film. I want to see Harley with female friends, and I want to see her evolve into the nuanced character that she is in the comics and that Margot Robbie clearly sees her as. I’m rooting for this movie so much, and I hope it’ll be as good as I want it to be. Considering Hudson wrote Bumblebee, I have faith.
Birds of Prey will hit theaters in February, and it cannot come soon enough.
(via CBR, image: Warner Bros.)
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